Andrew Sullivan asks Jim Manzi a few questions, and Manzi responds:

To me this is just incredibly profligate.  It’s like the justification for the Iraq War (in this way):  “trust us, it will pay for itself or close to it, we have to do it or face disaster, and we have to do it RIGHT NOW, stop raising all of these bothersome questions”. We are a wealthy country, but not so wealthy that we can literally burn more than a trillion dollars decade after decade on something that can demonstrate no appreciable benefits.

Sure, it’s just like the Iraq War. Decades of science using data freely available to all and leading to a series of rigorous, skeptical, peer-reviewed analyses suggesting that action should be taken culminating in a legislative process that has spanned several years is exactly like the rushed, abbreviated, stove-piped false intelligence fueled push to attack Iraq. Manzi is a smart guy, but this is perhaps the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen him write. Moreover, he’s simply wrong. Decadal defense spending, for instance, is something like $4 trillion. I’d guess that perhaps half of that is pure waste or unnecessary spending. And we’ve been spending like this for decades.

And I’ll reiterate again that a) the costs of the legislation are likely overstated, b) Manzi is assuming that there will be no ancillary benefits to the legislation, and c) Manzi is assuming that after this legislation is passed there is no change in global warming policy in America thereafter, ever, for the next century. I don’t have a problem with people using Manzi’s analysis as a datapoint to consider in determining how they feel about Waxman-Markey, but you’d have to check your common sense at the door to buy his interpretation of it. You’d have to assume that the uncertain costs of an unprecedented climatic shift are likely to be no big deal and well within our ability to handle, while the rather mundane use of government policy to trim a bit off of consumption in an effort to prevent us from killing hundreds of millions of people is bound to be totally debilitating.

Assume that global growth will continue as it has in the past, despite changing weather patterns, falling agricultural yields, and hundreds of millions of climate refugees upending geopolitics. Assume that temperature increase isn’t occurring faster than assumed in the 2007 IPCC (even though data indicates that it probably is). Assume that the lives of billions of the world’s poor don’t much matter because they don’t produce very much (so long as the average citizen of the world is ok, and by ok we mean consuming about as much as expected, we’re all ok). In that case, there is no need to act to reduce emissions. Now, go burn some coal!

It isn’t “sloppy, sentimental and self-righteous” to point out that those who don’t produce much output are still humans. And it isn’t particularly rigorous to look at your model of output and assume that everything will be as it’s always been despite climatic changes entirely unprecedented in recent geologic history.

So, it’s been a depressing week here in Washington, and I’m glad to be able to get away for a little while. I’ll be beachside from late this evening until, oh, July 5th or so, attempting to not spend quite so much time worrying about stuff. I’ll still be blogging some at Free exchange and Streetsblog, but the Bellows may be fairly quiet.

Until later…

Global warming, boy, Dick Gephardt doesn’t know. I attended this discussion yesterday, on infrastructure investment, with featured speakers Dick Gephardt and Newt Gingrich. Gingrich was pretty decent on infrastructure, but the only reference to climate change he could make was a comment about the need to invest in “green coal” and nuclear power. I expected more from Gephardt. I got less — “I’m not a scientist,” etc., “if it’s becoming a problem…if it’s true, and i hope it isn’t,” etc.

Just embarrassing. On other issues of foreign policy or economics legislators current and former would sooner die than plead ignorance. They’d make up things about China or deficits before hiding behind a defense like that.

The House vote on Waxman-Markey is imminent. I guess we’ll soon see whether America has anything to show for itself at Copenhagen, or if the rest of the world will have to try and sort something out to help themselves while 300 million of the world’s biggest emitters thank the lord that they managed to avoid shelling out $40 more for electricity in 2020.

I really don’t see where BDC is going with this. I’m not saying that we should develop downtown and nowhere else in the city. I’m saying that a limit on density is a limit on density, whether it’s a zoning rule applying in single-family home neighborhood or the height limit. I think we should build more density everywhere in the District, and I’m bothered by rules that prevent this in all cases.

And I am not at all suggesting that “existing character” should be a factor in considering upzoning in some places and not in others. Please go back and read my post again. I’m suggesting that we can talk about how nice increasing density in the lowest density areas would be all we want, but if you try to change the rules such that a Brookland bungalow can be replaced with even a modest sized multifamily development, you will be greeted by the angriest mob you have ever met.

BDC believes that growth in one part of the city necessarily comes at the expense of growth in another part of the city, but there is quite simply no evidence that this is the case.

Hey, the Post has numbers on public opinion regarding cap-and-trade. They’re generally favorable. Here are some interesting quotes:

Debate over the cap-and-trade approach has focused on the cost to the average American. The Congressional Budget Office estimated this week that cap and trade would cost the average U.S. household $175 a year in 2020, but House Republicans have pushed the message that the legislation would cost many times that and drive millions of jobs offshore.

That message has failed to sway liberal and moderate Republicans, 60 percent of whom back a cap-and-trade program, but it appeals to the party’s conservative base.

Really? Some 60% of liberal and moderate Republicans support cap-and-trade? That seems truly remarkable. Not among that 60% is this person:

Tiffany Collins, 31, a part-time children’s activity director at a church and a mother of four in Riverside, Calif., said she does not think greenhouse gases are causing climate change. She said she read a report on the Internet saying climate change was linked to changes in the sun’s activity. But in any case, she does not support government intervention. “I’m opposed to the government overregulating just about everything. It costs us money, and they don’t do a very good job of it,” she said.

Ugh. And here’s something that’s not at all surprising:

One of the sharpest dividing lines in attitudes toward climate legislation was age, with younger adults more receptive to cap and trade and federal regulation of greenhouse gases. Nearly two-thirds of those younger than 30 said they support cap and trade, and eight in 10 support federal limits on emissions. Among seniors, about four in 10 said they back a cap-and-trade proposal, and half favor federal intervention on emissions.

This is a real problem. One never knows, of course, but I like to think that in 2050 I’ll be alive and active, with maybe twenty more years ahead of me. Were I to have a kid sometime soon, he’d be in early middle age in 2050, potentially having a child of his own, and he’d probably expect to see 2100, when the United States will be quite a bit hotter. But someone who is currently in their 70s? For them, this is all academic. Here’s the really unforunate thing. The legislature in this country is very old, and it’s overwhelmingly elected by people who are also old. Paying more in energy costs to save the planet is easier to swallow when you expect to be on the planet for a long time to come.

Increasing the field to ten devalues nominations. Ok. We all remember that Gladiator won best picture, right?

BeyondDC thinks I think that density and height are synonyms. I don’t. I am able to recognize, however, that the two are related. If you want to add density to an area, you begin by adding people. But you can only add so many people in a given volume before folks start to complain. At some point, it necessarily becomes true that the height limit constrains further increases in density. In parts of the District, that point is right now. One could say that there are tens of square miles in the city in which heights are well below the limit, providing ample opportunity to increase density without doing a thing about the height limit. That fails to recognize that some neighborhoods, by their character, will never be upzoned. Most of Brookland, with its acres of single-family homes, will never be upzoned. Increased density mainly comes from redevelopment of upzone-able land in a few pockets in the city, and in those pockets, the height limit routinely becomes a factor (and will become more of a factor as the number of redevelop-able pockets declines).

BeyondDC’s main arguments against using the two terms somewhat interchangeably are as follows:

1. Tall buildings almost always end up wasting vast amounts of space to oversized plazas and setbacks. If one compares aerial images of say, Ballston and Dupont Circle, it is easy to see that even though Ballston is fully urban and “built out” in its center, there are massive gaps in the urban fabric as compared with Dupont. This effect doesn’t stop at plazas; taken to an unfortunately frequent extreme it often results in cities where land owners think nothing of achieving the same density by building twice as tall and leaving half their land for parking. When land isn’t at a premium, there’s no reason to conserve it.
2. Tall buildings are difficult to modify. Avent makes the excellent point that it’s counterproductive to prevent large rowhouses from being subdivided into smaller apartments because subdividing them increases the number of units and therefore increases density. He’s right, but that sort of thing is much more difficult and rare at the elevator building scale than at the rowhouse scale, which means that elevator buildings are more likely to keep their original number of units over time rather than increase them. Since large new buildings almost always have to be “luxurious” in order to justify their construction costs, they’re almost always built with a lower number of expansive interior units rather than a higher number of small units. This means that generally speaking, tall buildings have fewer units on a per-square-foot basis than short buildings.

BeyondDC seems to be confusing height with design. I wouldn’t point at the 1950s era monstrosities that characterize parts of downtown Washington as an unfortunate but inevitable consequence of the height limit. They’re an unfortunate consequence of stupid design. There is no reason at all that tall buildings can’t be built well and flexibly. You have but to walk through New York to see that most of the city’s tall buildings waste no space at ground level, and are often switched between uses.

BeyondDC is also making some silly statements about the economics of building tall that just aren’t supportable. Developers try to build tall overwhelmingly because land is at a premium. The gaps in the urban fabric don’t exist because tall buildings have made them value-less; quite the contrary. In most cases developers are working hard to transform them into similarly dense projects.

Large buildings don’t have to be luxurious to justify their construction costs. The tall condo buildings in Ballston are nice enough, but they’re not luxury units. BeyondDC seems to be imagining some bizarre world in which developers build tall and are forced to build luxury complexes to cover their costs, and yet their construction makes the surrounding land extraordinarily cheap. If that were the case, someone in the market for luxury could just buy surrounding land and build something truly luxurious for a pittance. Why buy some expansive condo priced high to cover a builder’s costs when you can pick up the parcel next to it for nothing and build a mansion?

Moreover, it’s irrelevant whether density per square foot is lower in tall buildings if they increase the absolute density of the city, which is what we’re talking about. BDC also seems to be imagining a world where if we were to make the height limit lower still, we’d increase density. That’s obviously not going to be the case.

I know people are sensitive about the height limit, but the fact remains — it prevents people from adding density in very green places. No place in the metropolitan area has the transit coverage of downtown Washington, but it’s simply impossible to increase the density of that area by any appreciable amount, for one reason and one reason only.

Mary Cheh is looking for ideas to make the District greener. Things like:

[C]ongestion pricing, vertical farming, “expanded retro-commissioning”, requiring carbon neutrality for public buildings, or “cool cars” that reflect solar energy…

Matt notes that since the District is the greenest part of the metropolitan area, the greenest thing it can do is work to increase its share of metropolitan jobs and people. This may sound tricky, but since there’s actually plenty of unmet demand for District homes and office space, as indicated by land prices and rents, it’s pretty simple — just let folks build more. And it’s really worth noting that things like vertical farming are actually actively counterproductive to efforts to green the city, since they wind up displacing people to less green places.

Back when I was all involved in the effort to support the development plan for the Brookland metro area, I testified in front of the Council. Another person, a young guy who worked for Casey Trees, testified against the plan because it would involve building on lots near Metro that currently contain trees. Development on those lots would have housed one hundred people or more. Protecting those particular trees, in other words, would displace people to other places within the metropolitan area, most of which are less green. Some of this pressure generates new greenfield development, which of course results in the loss of a lot of trees.

It would be nice if city leaders started thinking in this way, at least a little bit. You see the city adopting policies like the one in which old, large rowhouses are prevented from being subdivided into smaller units, because such subdivisions “change the character of the neighborhood, and make it difficult for larger families to stay in the city.” But in reality, those subdivisions increase the stock of housing, which helps to hold prices down, and by allowing more people to live in the city, they reduce metropolitan emissions per capita. (And anyway, if you really want families to stay in the city, your first three priorities should be the schools, the schools, and the schools).

The point is this, those who heedlessly support the city’s height limit or fight a development near metro are basically on the same side as coal executives, and it isn’t the right one.

Megan writes:

I don’t want to make too much of myself, but at the age of 22, I wrote what may be the worst novel ever penned in the English language.

I applaud her. At the age of 22, I had written the first ten pages of fifteen of the worst novels ever penned in the English language.