Leaf blowers (aka dust cannons), an ignored public nuisance

A policy aide to Austin City Council member Randi Shade responded to my (4/27/2009) diatribe and subsequent emails against “leaf blowers” as “perfect delivery systems for airborne pathogens” reporting amusement by the exchange. He admits to hating leaf blowers himself for their tendency to disperse mold spores and particulate matter and release “tremendous amounts of ozone” in their exhaust. He acknowledges this as a “perennial issue” – but not a compelling one. Hmmm… not compelling… hmmm. The Council member’s office reportedly receives “a few complaints.” The aide elaborates that homeowners don’t want anyone to tell them not to do something with their property and they don’t want to pay extra for leaf raking instead of blowing. Never mind the unintended consequences. Despite his “lifelong aversion” to leaf blowers, he reiterates that the City of Austin lacks majority will to outlaw or even limit hours of operation for leaf blowers.




Well, it gratifies me to know that I amused someone with my expression of outrage over an ignored public nuisance, a threat to public health, and a major contributor to air pollution and carbon dioxide and monoxide emissions. When I refer to “dust cannons,” I do so in a Kafkaesque humor. I use the term not so much to amuse readers but to call attention to the malignant effects of an innocuously-named machine. In Kafka’s explanation of the world, "Lack of evidence is treated as a pesky inconvenience, to be circumvented by such means as depositing unproven allegations into sealed files ..." In the modern case, those in position to remedy the situation ignore abundant evidence of a clear and present danger – presumably because wealthy and powerful constituencies have intimidated them into inaction.



<<Police Power: The authority conferred upon the states by the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and which the states delegate to their political subdivisions to enact measures to preserve and protect the safety, health, Welfare, and morals of the community. Police power describes the basic right of governments to make laws and regulations for the benefit of their communities. Police power provides the basis for enacting a variety of substantive laws in such areas as zoning, land use, fire and building codes, gambling, discrimination, parking, crime, licensing of professionals, liquor, motor vehicles, bicycles, nuisances, schooling, and sanitation. If a law enacted pursuant to the police power does not promote the health, safety, or welfare of the community, it is likely to be an unconstitutional deprivation of life, liberty, or property. The most common challenge to a statute enacted pursuant to the police power is that it constitutes a taking. A taking occurs when the government deprives a person of property or directly interferes with or substantially disturbs a person's use and enjoyment of his or her property. (The Free Dictionary, by FARLEX, [legal-dictionary])>>



If the Austin City Council banned “leaf blowers” within its city limits, could anyone argue credibly that the City had deprived them of their property or enjoyment thereof? If my neighbor uses a leaf blower to propel detritus and dust onto my property or into the public right-of-way, can he claim a constitutionally protected right to do that? Can a contractor, such as Easter Seals, claim a constitutional right to blow detritus and dust into the air and the public street even if doing so corrupts the air, water, and civic tranquility?



How, I must wonder, do leaf blowers square with Austin’s “Climate Protection Ordinance, or even EPA regulations?” Petrol-powered leaf blowers not only emit more contaminants than we allow from automobiles, but they gratuitously emit enormous quantities of greenhouse gases to perform tasks easily accomplished with brooms or rakes – if necessary at all. They directly spew contaminants into the air but they indirectly reduce vegetative vigor by stripping urban soils of organic matter (decaying leaves) necessary for plant vitality. The land scrapers return later to deposit mechanically shredded “mulch” to replace the fallen leaves they earlier blew away. The next crew blasts away the mechanically shredded mulch. Clever, no?



We require pollution controls on vehicles; why not on gasoline-powered tools? If we know that Austin routinely violates federal ground level ozone limits and that gasoline-powered leaf blowers emit copious quantities of volatile organic compounds (VOC) and oxides of nitrogen (NOx) – which interact in the presence of sunlight to become ground-level ozone; shouldn’t the City invoke its “police powers” to protect public health and safety. Ground level ozone (a major component of photochemical smog) causes severe damage to lungs. Houston and Beaumont, among other “non-attainment” places, require gasoline pumps to use special nozzles to recapture fumes that would otherwise exacerbate the local smog pollution. They and Austin now require sophisticated vehicle emissions tests. Austin neither requires vapor recapture at gasoline pumps nor does it impose any restrictions on how much unburned fuel can spew forth from motorized landscape maintenance tools. The sniff test demonstrates that they do spew.



Leaf blowers belong to the category of out-of-sight-out-of-mind nuisances. One might gag on the cloud of exhaust fumes, wince at the ear-splitting noise, or get a speck of dirt painfully lodged in one’s eye when walking too near one of these contraptions. The employee of a grocery store or doctor’s office residing in a shopping center with a parking lot swept daily with industrial strength dust cannons might not notice the fine particles of dust wafting in through the front door, but those particles do settle on every surface and air filter. Think of sinuses as a wet air filter. At any rate, in our busy lives, most people forget about it by the time they get to work or home or wherever they might fire off an angry note to a City Council member.



The Council policy aide assumes that a majority of homeowners would resent the City forbidding them to use blowers to blast their lawns, parking courts, and driveways. Well, that covers the wealthy and upper-middle-class. I wonder how many Austin voters consider themselves victims of the blow-and-go landscape crews. I wonder if anyone actually asked a representative sample of Austin residents how they felt about leaf blowers.



I also wonder if the Council aide checked with the folks at City of Austin Watershed Protection. Guys with leaf blowers generally don’t use them to corral leaves and litter so they can bag or compost the stuff. No, they usually blast leaves, acorns, twigs, cigarette butts, litter, snack wrappers, dust, and everything else not securely fastened, into the air, the street, neighboring properties, storm sewers, and nearby creeks. I doubt that occupants or owners of receiving properties feel neutral about this. I also suspect that “Save Our Springs Alliance” (SOS) and Lone Star Sierra Club, as well as all the other groups concerned about water quality feel indifferent about leaf blowers. Perhaps we should ask them.

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Garrick Ohlsson's warm honey smooth melismas

I want to thank Performance Today, from American Public Media (heard on KMFA radio, Austin, TX), for stoically broadcasting Daniel Barenboim, with Asher Fisch conducting the Berlin Philharmonic, performing Frédéric Chopin’s Piano Concerti Nos 1 & 2.  These public radio renderings demonstrated unequivocally the extraordinary difficulty of making enchanting music that so few can master.  I might have enjoyed this performance more if I had heard it first, but I didn’t.

Garrick Ohlsson performed these Chopin masterworks dreamily on one of my most treasured recordings with Polish Radio National Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Jerzy Maksymiuk (EMI 1976).  His warm honey smoothness evokes crystalline glittering mountain streams, butterflies gliding and fluttering among multi-hued falling leaves on a crisp but warm autumn afternoon.  In some phrases, the soaring purity of Chopin’s melody takes me on a walk through a magical garden under a starlit sky.  Truly, the Hand of God works through this man’s music.  His style sounds so effortless, spontaneous, and natural as to convince me that the piano itself wants nothing more than, in fact lives, to produce this mellifluous stream of heavenly melismas before it dies, having produced the most beautiful sounds that could ever emanate from a lacquered black box with a harp of gold.

As for Mr. Barenboim and the Berlin Philharmonic, well, not so much so.

Unlike the aforementioned 1976 recording, Mr. Ohlsson does not belong to the past.  In January 2009 he breathtakingly performed Antonin Dvořák’s Piano Concerto in G Minor with the Austin Symphony Orchestra.  Like a unique fingerprint, apparently no one else can produce eighth and sixteenth note melismas with Ohlsson’s warm honey smooth touch.  Of all the magnificent performances in the 2008-2009 ASO season, Garrick Ohlsson’s performance stands out as one of my favorites.

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Walk Scores, “smart growth,” and urban amenity

The Atlantic monthly described Los Angeles, California [back in the mid-1980s, before Google indexing] as having transformed urban sprawl into urban squeeze-all. Despite that 20-something year old observation, “Los Angelization” still means endless urban-suburban sprawling development. That helps justify my surprise to learn from “Walk Score” (http://www.walkscore.com/rankings/) that Los Angeles and – even more specifically – Long Beach had become two of the most “walkable” cities in America.




My friend, Jeff, who lives in a part of Long Beach called Belmont Shore, enjoys [based on his address] an enviable walk score of 83% -- “very walkable.” That reflects proximity of establishments and amenities that would not require neighborhood residents to use a car to enjoy. I did notice while visiting him recently that his very narrow street precludes high-speed traffic and discourages motorists from cutting through his immediate neighborhood – very important for pedestrians. The major thoroughfares within two blocks of Jeff’s house (actually a condo that looks like a townhome) can carry a large volume of traffic while not discouraging pedestrians from using the very generously wide sidewalks. Alleyways allow residents to park off-street without the nuisance of driveways crossing the sidewalk every 20-30 feet on the front sides of the houses. Alley-accessed garages also prevent motorists from blocking sidewalks with their parked vehicles. Maybe someday Austin’s Planning Commission will understand.



Walk Score represents a fairly sophisticated agglomeration of software technology and databases to derive a rather crude estimation of urban lifestyles. It relies on Google maps – not always the most up-to-date (except for all the others) and it asks no questions about personal habits. That said, in general terms, it works pretty well for what it does. Jeff receives no penalty in Walk Score for driving a big GM SUV to work every day and I receive no indulgences for owning a Honda Civic that mostly stays parked during the week because I ride the bus to work. I also get no credit for working in downtown Austin – with walk scores between 90 and 100. My home address rates a pathetic walk score of 32% in a purportedly “car-dependent” neighborhood in South Austin.



Austin’s City Council and Planning Commission could learn some useful things by studying walk scores, visiting, and studying places that rank low and high. Visiting a place tells me things that no formulaic score ever could. Texans have endured several decades of urban development designed to accommodate cars rather than people. It will take time to reverse the trend. It takes a conscious effort to understand what differentiates a “car-dependent” neighborhood from a “walker’s paradise.” Looking around Austin, I have noticed that numerous urban design features contribute to these different orientations. These include: large lots, long blocks, wide streets, no alleyways, frequent curb cuts for driveways, small floor-to-area ratios, zoning that separates most housing from commercial, institutional, and recreational activities by large distances, and sidewalks that look like afterthoughts. Whoever decided that a three-foot wide sidewalk, separated from 50-mile-per-hour traffic by only a curb and gutter, would suffice obviously never used one and never intends to.



Recent and repeated experiences with two starkly different types of urban development in Austin lead me to question the steadfastness of City Council’s commitment to so-called “smart growth” (not a tumor that developed cognitive capabilities, probably). “The Triangle” mixed-use development, between Guadalupe, Lamar, and 45th Streets, represents a new example of relatively walkable urban development. “South Park Meadows” exemplifies a pedestrian-hostile style of recent suburban development that the authorities should have banned decades ago. One glance, at the cyclopean brutalism of the JC Penney storefront that punishes shoppers by confronting them with glaring sunlight and the gauntlet of a very wide driveway immediately upon leaving the establishment, tells me instantly that the designers of this shopping center cared little or nothing about the safety of pedestrians – as long as they spend money and leave quickly. One glance at The Triangle, gives one the impression of a consciously urban neighborhood that intends not to look anything like a suburban shopping center.



The differences go on from there. Triangle involves mixed land uses; South Park sharply segregates land uses. T: covered and stacked parking vs SPM: featured & exposed surface lot parking. T: encourages walking vs SPM: discourages walking. How does the development connect to adjacent areas? Major local streets define the Triangle’s perimeter and separate it somewhat from nearby neighborhoods and office complexes but not insurmountably so. Residences inside the Triangle enjoy very easy pedestrian access to internal commercial tenants. Inter-regional freeway and high-speed divided arterial thoroughfares create daunting barriers separating SPM from nearby tracts of land that generally do not attract pedestrian interest. Very long stretches of narrow sidewalks immediately adjacent to high-speed traffic present a daunting prospect for residents of even the nearest external neighborhood. Apartments and detached housing inside SPM development lack inviting pedestrian connections to commercial areas.



Triangle businesses use windows to let in light as well as allow customers to see people and landscaping outside. SPM businesses hardly use windows at all. A few that exist allow customers to see traffic and sun glinting off of parked cars. Mostly, SPM windows exist to display merchandise. One restaurant has fake windows on the outside while diners cannot see out. A buffet place has huge windows that during lunch admit huge glare that screens and shades to not sufficiently buffer.



Vehicular access to and circulation within the Triangle resembles local, people-scaled streets in a logical grid pattern. SPM vehicular access appears poorly designed for cars and not at all for pedestrians or even bicyclists. The driveways provide access from one parking lot to another but offset intersections and lack of a discernible street grid tend to confuse and disorient motorists. I imagine that the maze-like layout in SPM parking lots increases the likelihood of vehicular and pedestrian mishaps. The multiple undifferentiated bays (retail strips surrounding parking lots) interferes with the ability of visitors to find particular stores except Wal-Mart, Target, and Starbucks – the ones with the biggest signs. Actual named streets with logically assigned addresses would have made this development much easier to navigate. To locate something in building B, slot 4, does not help. Actually, it might help, but they don’t even provide that.



Hours of operation and invitation differ considerably between Triangle and SPM. Even if a store reportedly stays open late, its immediate environment can render it uninviting. South Park Meadows provides a desolate prospect after dark: Vast, confusing parking lots, with numerous dark spots, and no visible passive [or active] surveillance to deter criminal behavior. Indeed, the SPM parking lot seems the most likely place around to find juvenile delinquents on a Friday or Saturday night. Only the armed and dangerous or the foolhardy would feel confident in this suburban wasteland after sundown.



The appearance and functionality of the Triangle differs markedly from the careless design features of SPM. Apartments and offices above ground floor retail space provide an abundance of passive surveillance. Dozens of windows overlook practically every outdoor space on the property. Bars, restaurants, and cafés enable patrons to watch passersby and several establishments offer outdoor seating. This kind of “watching” seems pleasurable rather than paranoid. Smokers congregating outside a place serving food and drink seem convivial; whereas, smokers outside Wal-Mart or JC Penney exude an aura of junior high school “bad kids” misbehaving behind the temporary classrooms. The enclosure created by narrow streets and nearby buildings gives the Triangle a sense of intimacy and shelter totally lacking from SPM. Wind and traffic noise at SPM drowns out voices. The Triangle’s sheltering outdoor spaces enable one to hear and overhear conversations. Such an auditory environment contributes to the sense of safety that I experience there. Adequate lighting and open design makes even the parking garage at the Triangle feel far safer than the lavishly landscaped, wide open parking lots of South Park Meadows.



Scale contributes to the sense of intimacy or not. Big box storefronts at SPM must shout visually enough to capture attention of motorists across a gulf of asphalt even with tasteful landscaping. Big box architecture menacingly admonishes people to move along. Human-scale urban design, such as in the Triangle, invites people to tarry, talk, and relax.



Creating a setting that encourages walking requires the complementary inclusion of access to public transportation. Only two CapitalMetro bus routes serve SPM (1L and 201) – infrequently. At least five bus routes serve The Triangle; overlapping and intersecting routes, as well as a park and ride lot, clutter up this part of the CAPMETRO system map such that I cannot say with certainty how many routes serve The Triangle.



In addition to aesthetics, infrastructure costs differentiate these two developments. Like all suburban projects, simply extending pipes and wires to an urban edge location and building new streets costs more than adding utility customers to an existing part of the city. Single story construction inherently disperses buildings and pseudo-streets over a larger area than would happen using multi-story buildings. SPM developers spent a great deal of money laying pipes (water, sewer, gas) and wires (electric, telecommunications) under so much impervious ground cover (new pavement) such that they greatly reduced the proportion of the total construction and maintenance budgets remaining for amenities – to say nothing of developers’ profits.



If Austin’s City Council and Planning Commission sincerely want to promote “smart growth,” they will encourage more development like The Triangle and discourage development like South Park Meadows. By the imperfect measurement of Walk Score, SPM rates 63%; The Triangle rates 88%. Ironically, the 63% for SPM probably gives it more credit than it deserves; Walk Score rates residential addresses, no one actually lives at 9300 I-35 South. On the other hand, people actually do live at 4700 N Lamar.

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At what cost continuity?

John Kenneth Galbraith gets credit for saying, "things which can't go on indefinitely, don't.”  John Maynard Keynes said: "In the long run, we're all dead."  As well as: “The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.”

Cheap energy facilitated an era of fantastic technological development and unprecedented population growth.  Fossil fuels enabled concentrations of energy sufficient to allow humans to fly and travel tremendous distances at great speed.  Cheap energy allowed humanity, using industrial agriculture, to feed a population several times greater than the Earth had ever supported before.  We often forget that we fertilize those crops with the remains of micro-organisms deposited in the oceans hundreds of millions of years ago.  That kind of compost takes a long time to cook.  Cheap energy made the twentieth century an interval of profligacy.  The one that follows will look quite different.

As the fossil fuel era draws to a close, current accounting restrictions will test the cleverness of humans to live on whatever biomass the sun allows to grow here day by day.  We find ourselves rushing headlong into a period of parsimony.  By this I don’t mean stinginess, although that will doubtless happen.  I mean that the dictum of Mies van der Rohe, “Less is more,” will become a meaningful guiding light in a whole new way.  I presume that Mies coined the philosophy as a design feature characterized by unornamented buildings with large expanses of glass.  Twenty-first century use of the term will go more in the direction of:  less energy expended on frivolous and unnecessary uses will leave more available for necessary and vital uses.  Our values will change.  Energy from the sun costs nothing, but building the apparatus necessary to collect it costs considerably.

As our priorities change, we will increasingly find ourselves cutting back on customary expenses to save up for “clean energy” hardware and infrastructure.  Priorities, attitudes, and opinions change all the time, but once in a while the Earth moves beneath our feet.  Probably every life involves a turning point, a moment of revelation.  Nothing changes in the material world around us, but everything changes in our perception of it.  The more things change, the more they stay the same.  Albert Einstein reportedly said, “The release of atom[ic] power has changed everything except our way of thinking...the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind.  If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker.”  Alas, that genie will never go back into the bottle.  Of course the world and the way we think both change constantly, if infinitesimally in our lifetimes.  A life, such as Einstein’s, filled with exploration and discovery tends to throw these truths into sharp relief.  Most of us don’t understand that except vicariously.  Sometimes, charitable historians will clue us in.

In retrospect, philosophers and historians might label the unfolding era as one of revolutionary invention, or crushing disillusionment, or reckoning.  As the era of cheap energy gives way to one of expensive energy, we will learn the harsh penalties for easy luxury and unearned wealth.  We have lost our living memory of the hardship so familiar to our forebears.  Someone must eventually pay the bill for a century’s worth of living beyond our means.  Cheap energy, spending beyond our means, and living on easy credit has distorted our understanding of wealth and power.  American ability to set energy prices to its advantage disappeared so recently that Americans still act like they control something.  John D. Rockefeller established the Standard Oil global empire in the United States in 1870 and with it inaugurated the petroleum era.  After the U.S. reached its peak of oil production in 1970, imports dramatically increased.  U.S. net imports of petroleum first exceeded production, around 1995.  At that time, power inexorably shifted to other parts of the globe.  Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice illustrated one of her moments of revelation in 2006, that the hunt for oil and gas was “distorting international politics in a very major way.”

Ms. Rice would probably never acknowledge that the petroleum business distorts many things at every step of its journey through the economy and the ecology.  Like other fossil fuels, oil and gas distort our understanding of material wealth and ecosystem services.  Oil tycoons reap fortunes by pumping out of the ground hydrocarbons that took millions of years to accumulate.  Most people calculating the energy return on energy investment of an oil well will ignore those millions of years of sunlight (and countless microbes) and count only the relatively miniscule quantity of energy used to manufacture the equipment, build the well, pump the oil out of the ground, refine it, and transport it to market.  The externalized distortions inflicted by fossil fuels extend to degradation of water quality, arable soil, air quality, wildlife habitats, insect populations that pollinate our food crops, and live green spaces necessary for mental health.  An honest accounting would include not only direct effects of the industry but indirect effects that would not happen but for the presence of a global petroleum industry.

Petrodictators (as Thomas Friedman calls them) ruling over pre-democratic nations accumulate oil wealth for themselves and impoverish their compatriots.  We first world inhabitants take great pride in looking down our noses at third-world despots, inventorying their manifold faults.  We bemoan the destruction of tropical rainforests, wildlife habitats, and ocean fisheries.  Other than a few self-righteous – and masochistic – intellectuals, hardly any first worlders care to look at the gross transgressions that our political leaders and captains of industry have inflicted on the rest of the world.  American and European capitalism have created a thoroughly unsustainable economic system and involved the entire world in the scheme.  Most of us don’t want to consider the implications of John Muir’s belief in the interconnectedness of everything.

The great circle of life goes way beyond carnivores and herbivores.  As Carl Sagan pointed out, we come from “star stuff.”  Michael Dowd, quoting someone else, refers to human consciousness as the universe evolved sufficiently to look back at itself (paraphrase).  The sun provides the energy for everything on Earth.  Climate and weather shape the surface geology and geography of the land (more star stuff) while circumscribing what will live where.  The Earth shaped humans and we shape it in return.  Energy, water, and nutrients constantly cycle through the biosphere.  We appropriated an outrageous fortune left by our predecessors – plants, animals, microbes – in the form of fossil fuels.  As we return their heretofore sequestered carbon to the atmosphere, we alter planetary climate, which in turn predestines the rise and fall of future species.

Luckily for us and our heirs and assigns, according to astrophysicists, the sun will continue to grace our solar system with its atomic fusion power for a few billion more years.  After four and a half billion years of evolutionary struggle on this planet, about that many years left in our local star’s fuel tank, and 14 billion or so since the most recent “Big Bang,” we should feel reasonably confident that The Creator will allow us a considerable amount of time to screw up before finally pulling the plug.

That said, we probably need to steel ourselves for a prolonged period of trial and tribulation after the hydrocarbon extravaganza.  If climate change had not alerted us to the need to change our behavior, the imminent decline in available fossil fuels certainly would have.  Having burned through a legacy, that took millions of years to accumulate, in the course of two centuries, it might take some time to replenish our assets using current resources – i.e. energy provided by the sun every day.  During such time, frugality and cleverness will serve us well.  Mindless [or willful] profligate ostentation will come to symbolize the most shameful kind of immorality.

The Great Depression of the 1930s gives a foreshadowing of the parsimony we might need to survive in the near future.  However, I predict that the coming era of thrift will cause previous eras of cautious living to pale in comparison. (See James Howard Kunstler’s “Long Emergency” for more fear and loathing on the way to a sustainable future.)

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Quasi-tropical California Vacation

How annoying to fly half way across the continent and forget to take decent pictures! Bringing a camera does not help if it remains in one’s suitcase. A camera phone makes a poor substitute. On a recent six-day vacation, I took advantage of a sale on Southwest Airlines. For only the modest sacrifice of one plane change each way (Houston going, Denver returning), I travelled to Southern California for only $238.90 round-trip from Austin to LAX.

Motoring along the L.A. freeways, I saw real tropical plants and fake ones. They disguise their cell phone towers to look like either palm trees or Norfolk Island pine trees. On Texas freeways I generally don’t see tropical landscaping; TXDOT generally never gets fancier than loblolly pine trees and a few bluebonnets. The weather gods must have smiled on me and dissipated the famous smog. I had forgotten that on a clear day one can see downtown L.A. from LAX – only 8 miles distant. The wild fires in Angeles National Forest had died down such that I could not see them and only saw a trace of smoke flying in. On many of the freeways (and L.A. has very many) one cannot see much of anything because of the noise barrier walls protecting adjacent neighborhoods. I saw several freeways – some landscaped, some walled – on the 14-mile trip from LAX to Long Beach. Very oddly, the few episodes of heavy traffic I saw seemed uneventful, compared to the exasperating jams that I know from I-35 in Austin and the various freeways in Houston. California freeways carry a lot of traffic but don’t seem as gargantuan as, say, Houston’s Katy Freeway (circa ½ mile wide for about 30 miles).

My very dear friend, Jeff picked me up at LAX Airport and let me stay at his lovely home in Long Beach. His extraordinarily well-behaved English bull terrier, Victoria, never jumped on me and always obeyed Jeff’s commands. From the end of his street, walking along East Ocean Boulevard, we could see the cruise ships (way bigger than the Titanic) at the docks. Jeff informed me that the artificial islands only a mile or two from shore conceal oil drilling platforms. I might otherwise have mistaken them for offices or communications complexes – quite well disguised for oil drilling rigs. I did not see any surfers. Away from the beach, toward East 2^nd Street, we walked to all kinds of shopping and restaurants. I can see why Jeff likes Long Beach; it seems much more walkable than most other neighborhoods in the Los Angeles area.

While walking around Jeff’s neighborhood, the vegetation impressed me. Although farther north than Dallas (which routinely receives at least one ice storm per winter), Long Beach enjoys the moderating influences of Ocean currents. I saw a tremendous variety of tropical plants growing outside, in the ground, established as if having lived there for many years. Jeff tells me that it never freezes in Long Beach. Plants I noticed included: Norfolk Island pine (Araucaria heterophylla), Erythrina (crista-galli, I think), Princess flower (Tibouchina urvilleana), bird of paradise (Strelitzia reginae), Australian eucalyptus trees, the list goes on and on.

I still don’t understand how a place on the water, that never freezes, can enjoy relatively low humidity (they don’t realize how low) and virtually no mosquitoes. They also never get hurricanes. So what, if an earthquake rolls through once in a while?

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Texas Megaregion rail choices: high speed, local service, electric, diesel, cities served, Where?…When?

Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, Austin, and San Antonio comprise the larger cities in the “Texas Triangle Megaregion.” A variety of economic, social, and environmental issues demand attention at a scale that neither municipalities, counties, nor metropolitan area councils can adequately address. A group of well-informed and respected people from around the state and the nation met recently and placed transportation at the top of the list. Problems of traffic congestion, airport hassles, lost productivity, convenience, pollution, fuel consumption, trade deficits, economic equity, mobility maintenance for elderly and disabled, and maintaining quality of life in general urge Texans to think ever more earnestly about reinstating passenger rail transportation within and among Texas cities. As our legislature and any number of public meetings can attest; we in Texas do not find cooperation easy. Making big decisions about statewide rail transit systems will test our resolve, diplomatic skills, [and ability to get beyond talking] like nothing else.

Houston Tomorrow (www.houstontomorrow.org) convened a conference at the historic Rice Hotel, September 24-25, 2009, called “Megaregions + Metro Prosperity, sustainable economics for the Texas Triangle.” The representative of Greater Houston Partnership, Dan Bellow, apparently did not recognize the irony in proudly reporting Houston’s 8% annual population growth rate at a conference on sustainability. Ostensibly, conferees expected to discuss energy, water, food, green space, transportation, and equity – which we did. However, the sleek passenger train on the brochures might have biased the interests of the participants. Intercity rail transportation became the topic of strongest interest among those who gathered.

With event sponsors like Metropolitan Transit Authority, councils of government, architects, engineering firms, chambers of commerce, universities, regional planning authorities, and sustainability advocates – representing jurisdictions throughout the most populous region of Texas – it should have come as no surprise that inter-city, especially high-speed rail would dominate the topics of conversation. Another footnoted detail contributed to the collective angst; the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) stimulus program caught Texas unprepared. With no statewide rail transportation plan [let alone one involving high-speed rail], Texas could not take advantage of the windfall made available by the President and Congress this year.

Interest in preparing for major public infrastructure investments does not occur naturally or evenly across our state. Unlike Houston, over the decades Dallas and Fort Worth did not engulf almost all of their adjacent municipalities. “The Metroplex” consists of a collection of varying sized cities. Their proximity and unwillingness to allow big neighbors to annex them has given all of those places a seat at any number of negotiation tables. Economic necessity required them to cooperate with each other for many years to build all sorts of infrastructure – including light rail transit. Unsurprisingly, the Metroplex has succeeded better than any other urban area in Texas at cooperating, negotiating, finding consensus, and planning big projects. Dallas Area Rapid Transit – DART Rail got up and running before any other light rail system in Texas since the demise of most U.S. urban rail systems right around World War II.

The inability to plan for the future seems to imbue public officials with a vague tinge of shame that manifests in timid apologies for letting major opportunities slip away. Every place in Texas seems to consider itself terminally unique. Speaker after speaker started out saying how other people in other places do things, “but [our city] is different.” Car and pickup truck culture, oil industry, agriculture, alien abductions, …whatever; I won’t go into all the unrepeatable claims to fame. Every Texas city undoubtedly deserves a mention in the Journal of Irreproducible Results. Representatives of each city can explain why automobiles, rather than trains, will always serve the vast majority of transportation needs in their domain. Conversely, they can also make reasonably cogent arguments for what places their city at the center of the triangle. The majority of conferees voted that Houston and Dallas should get connected first – as the two largest metropolitan areas, assuming the largest daily exchange of travelers. After that vote, Harris County Judge Ed Emmett explained that connecting Houston with Austin should come first. Emmett pointed out that Houston Metro owns or has rights to existing track in the highway 290 corridor out to Hempstead and Capital Metro owns the tracks in the same corridor from Austin to Giddings. Restoring the previously abandoned tracks in between those two segments – to serve the traffic between Texas’ largest port city and the state capital – made the most sense to him.

Judge Emmett’s argument, juxtaposed with the discussion of the earlier expression of preference, got me thinking about prioritization criteria. Where should the starter line go? Should the first line connect the largest cities; serve the most likely passengers; utilize the most easily-acquired right-of-way; or some other criteria? Who will oppose the project and what arguments will overcome the most likely objections? Can anyone prove rail’s cost-effectiveness compared to highways or airlines? Will the public care about benefits to the environment or safety? High-speed rail cannot share track with other types of train; but can it share the same corridor using adjacent track? Where will the funding come from? Will the public accept a new tax in return for a new public benefit? Who will build it? Who will operate it? Should it connect city centers, or airports, or both? How and where should high-speed rail lines connect to other modes of transportation? How will Texas’ high-speed rail connect with lines to other states? In the absence of a resolute dictatorial edict, a great deal of study and negotiation will probably need to precede the final decision.

Success seemed a very important criterion for the starter line because failure would undermine efforts to build future track segments. Several experts expressed the opinion that high-speed rail works best on trips of about 300-600 miles, while conventional rail works better on runs less than 300 miles – for local service, and airlines work better on trips exceeding 600 miles. Several participants believed that Prairie View A&M should get service to Houston and that Bryan-College Station should get rapid service to both Houston and Austin to improve student access, affordability, and intercollegiate ventures.

The Megaregions conference in Houston, as many do, seemed to raise more questions than it answered. It confirmed the existence of broad support for inter-city high-speed rail service in Texas. It also reminded a very earnest group of idealists that achieving consensus and acting on it in Texas can and often does become a quixotic exercise in futility and exasperation. I believe that many of the participants, like me, left the conference with a newly tempered sense of cautious optimism and perhaps a more realistic understanding of the difficulties we face in making high-speed passenger rail transportation in Texas a reality.

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The [energy-economic] climate is a-changing

When the earth shifts beneath our feet, we can easily lose our sense of direction. When a fish finds itself out of water, it must learn to walk and breathe air or die. Ben Bernanke recently read the tea leaves and ventured to predict an imminent resolution to the current recession. His tea leaves seem to settle out in a very tiny corner of a very large cup. If he has acknowledged publicly any role played by global energy markets in the recent economic unpleasantness, I have not heard it. While studying energy market trends, it occurs to me that the lessons of the Great Depression provide only limited guidance to navigating our way out of the present “recession.” nb: If I still have a job, I call it a “recession;” if I lose my job and cannot find another, I call it a “depression.” Revolutions tend to subvert policy.

If economic recovery involves a resumption of petroleum and natural gas consumption patterns similar to those prior to 2008, energy prices will return to the highs that crushed the economy in 2008. Hurricanes Ivan (2004) and Katrina/ Rita (2005) damaged the Gulf Coast natural gas infrastructure, caused prices to spike, and convinced consumers to conserve fuel. Subsequently, consumption crept back up. Global demand in excess of supply caused the historic oil and gas price spikes in July 2008. Industrial consumers said, “enough,” and shut down. That action freed up enough supply to cause the price to fall for everyone else who remained in the market.

Industrial consumption of natural gas (33% of U.S. market) has exceeded residential natural gas consumption (21% of U.S. market) since at least 1997 (U.S. Energy Information Administration). While residential (21%) and commercial consumption (13% of U.S. market) have recently remained relatively constant as a share of all U.S. natural gas consumption, industrial consumption has declined from 37% of all consumption in 1997 to 28.5% in 2008. (EIA started separating “industrial” from “commercial” consumption in 1997.) We all know about “outsourcing” but don’t always consider the complacency that it can promote in the general public. At the same time, natural gas used for electric power generation has increased from 18% of all consumption in 1997 to 28.7% in 2008. Electric utilities like to claim that they use the cleanest available fossil fuels – as opposed to “dirty coal.”

We can attribute today’s low market price for natural gas to both recessionary demand destruction (industry that stopped) and long-term decline in natural gas consumption by industrial consumers. Since 1998, industrial sector natural gas consumption declined by an average of 2% per year.

U.S. Natural Gas Consumption in trillions of cubic feet

Consumption Sector	1990	2008
Residential	4.5	4.86 (relatively stable, rising)
Commercial	2.99	3.1 (growing slightly)
Industrial	8.3	6.6 (declining markedly)
Vehicle fuel	0.009	0.030 (negligible, but growing)
Electric power	4.6	6.66 (growing markedly)
All consumers	20.4	21.3 (relatively stable, rising)

Large-scale speculation might or might not have occurred in the lead up to the price spike and subsequent collapse of energy prices in 2008. Rather than blaming the speculators who exploited a market opportunity, we must consider the vulnerability of an economy so utterly dependent on fossil fuels. We can assume that unscrupulous speculators will take advantage of commodities in limited supply. Rather than blaming the leopard for having spots, we can protect ourselves by not walking in front of the leopard’s nose. The sun shines and the wind blows, irrespective of the governments in power.

EIA statistics show growth slowing. Between 1931 and 2008, U.S. residential consumption of natural gas increased by an average of 3.8% per year while commercial (including industrial) rose 5% (average annual increase). Between 1990 and 2008 residential consumption rose by 0.2% while commercial consumption rose by 0.8% -- less than 1% each. Since July 2008, monthly natural gas consumption (compared to year earlier) has declined overall by 3.8%, residential increased 1.1%, commercial increased 0.85%, industrial declined 8%, vehicle fuel increased by 12.7%, natural gas for electric power declined 2.8%. This represents an acceleration of the decline in industrial consumption and an apparent reversal of the trend toward producing more electricity from natural gas combustion.

Coal consumed for electricity production also fell since July 2008. EIA shows overall coal consumption rising 1.44% from 2007 to 2008, electric utility coal consumption rising 1.72%, and industrial consumption rising 8.05% in the same period (first 6 months of the year). Comparing the January-June period of 2009 to that of 2008, overall consumption fell 11.11%, electric utility consumption fell 10.94%, and industrial consumption fell 11.21%. Clearly, industrial energy consumption has fallen faster than that of the rest of the economy. It also appears that coal-fired electricity production declined more than that produced by burning natural gas.

While industry and electric utilities strive to clean up their acts by switching from coal to natural gas, they have placed themselves in the position of directly competing with residential consumers for the same “clean” fossil fuel. EIA data show sudden drop offs in fuel consumption by industry, presumably a result of factories shutting down. Electric utilities change their behavior much more gradually.

The interplay of commercial and social behavior makes energy markets particularly tricky to predict. U.S. and global energy markets can rapidly reverse directions when fortunes lie at stake. Rising energy prices encourage drilling for oil and gas and consumer thrift. Falling prices discourage drilling and thrift. Exhaustion of conventional petroleum reserves encourages exploration of “unconventional” reserves. Unconventional reserves cost more to produce – otherwise, someone would have produced them before now. Production of unconventional reserves must wait for the passage of certain price thresholds in order to ensure profitability. All of the proposed production from unconventional petroleum reserves requires far greater energy investment than more conventional methods of extraction.

High energy prices in 2008 destroyed demand among those who could no longer afford them, thus inducing a recession. Energy industry workers laid off in the recession return to school to learn how to utilize unconventional [petroleum] energy sources – along with newly-minted engineers. Recessionary pressures depress natural gas prices, thus discouraging production of unconventional reserves and reducing demand for petroleum engineers. Dwindling conventional reserves might cause shortages and higher energy prices even before the economy recovers. The market does not set its clock for the convenience of everyone equally.

Concerns about climate change arising from greenhouse gas emissions cast doubt on the whole enterprise of fossil fuel production and consumption. With rising temperatures, energy prices, and rhetorical histrionics, the public and its leaders might lose track of whatever problems they can practically manage. Lacking a broad, long-term perspective, public energy policy takes on the behavior of a dog chasing its tail.

We need renewable energy to end this recession and avoid falling into dependency on foreign petro-dictators (see Thomas Friedman’s “Hot, Flat, and Crowded). Factors affecting the costs and availability of fossil fuels differ from those of renewable fuels. Geology limits geographic distribution of fossil fuels. Renewable fuels experience different constraints but fewer governed by geology. Their diversity (wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, biomass…) allows for wider geographic distribution than that of fossil fuels. Cartels cannot control the prices of renewable fuels. The sun will continue to shine and the wind to blow long after we exhaust all our domestic reserves of oil, gas, and coal.

High and unstable prices for fossil fuels make investment in renewable energy attractive by comparison. Low prices for fossil fuels make renewable energy investments less attractive for a while. Those who fail to understand the cyclical nature of fossil fuel prices will pay a high price if they fail to invest in renewable energy resources when given the opportunity. Those who hope to earn windfall profits when fossil fuel prices rise again might get a rude awakening when they find that the market simply will not bear extremely high prices but will instead destroy demand and reinvigorate recessionary forces. Even a monopoly commodity will reach a maximum price when customers can no longer afford it.

Today’s recession-induced low energy prices lull many consumers into a false sense of security about future fossil fuel prices and availability. The academies of energy engineering still cling to the belief that fossil fuels will dominate our energy resources for the foreseeable future. They seem not to understand that something fundamental has changed in the energy markets. Perhaps petroleum drilling technology will someday translate into geothermal technology.

The Texas Railroad Commission, Natural Gas Trends (8/31/09) recently reported, “The Colorado School of Mines recently announced its establishment of the Unconventional Natural Gas Institute. The Institute’s focus is on upstream research and development of natural gas from unconventional natural gas resources such as shale, coalbed methane, gas hydrates and tight sands.” http://www.rrc.state.tx.us/forms/publications/ngtrends/2009/NatGasTrends083109.pdf

All of these resources involve fossil origins and contribute to greenhouse gas emissions. In these examples, “unconventional” suggests expensive and energy intensive production methods. Conventional natural gas production extracts gas in more-or-less its natural state by drilling deep underground. These unconventional methods require addition of heat and other extreme processes to liberate the methane from its host geological formations. At some unknown point, the energy costs of production will exceed the energy value produced. If the energy return on energy investment (EROEI) ratio does not yield a number greater than one, the dollar cost no longer matters and the endeavor becomes pointless. The energy expended in research and development of unconventional methods belongs to the “energy investment” side of the equation. Since we don’t know how much energy unconventional methods will yield, we could easily exceed possible energy returns without knowing it until long after the fact.

The existing glut of natural gas, noted in the Railroad Commission’s newsletter, keeps the price low. It also discourages exploration and development of the aforementioned unconventional reserves. The existence of the natural gas surplus suggests something else to me: that the economy remains firmly mired in recession. Idled industrial activity has made its otherwise sizeable share of consumption available to everyone else. Even a modest economic rebound might easily reclaim enough industrial market share to send natural gas prices sharply upward again.

In order to keep natural gas prices low, every sector of the economy must find ways to reduce, eliminate, and replace natural gas consumption with renewable fuels or conservation.

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