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Comment by jhulla | Hacker News Reader

Focusing global political will into action to address climate change is hard.

What is depressing is that even when local benefits are present, it is challenging to enact policy. Case in point: the folks over at Citylab periodically write about the loss of urban forests.

Here is an article from May'17: McMansions Are Killing L.A.'s Urban Forest. https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/05/as-officials-push-for...

Look at the attached map, even the liberal enclaves of Santa Monica, Venice, Manhattan Beach, BelAir, Hollywood Hills and Beverly Hills show tree cover loss.

Sad.

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We need a new 'Manhattan project' to find and enforce a solution. The best and brightest minds from all over the world in one place, focusing on this issue 24/7. The situation cannot be underestimated anymore.

Realistically, we can't expect people to live peacefully in lands without food and water. This is going to kickstart the biggest migratory wave in history.

> We need a new 'Manhattan project' to find and enforce a solution.

"Stop cutting down trees goddammit" doesn't seem all that hard.

Would you preserve a tree at the expense of a large apartment building in a walkable are that would let a few hundred people switch from driving to walking commutes?

It would be nice if that were a dilemma that arose! Instead, at least around here, it's a question of preserving glades at the expense of shitty condos for rich people in the middle of working-class neighborhoods that've been established for decades and have no desire to be overshadowed - literally; the latest specimen is a collection of four-story buildings in a neighborhood of single-story houses - because some assholes with a taste for slumming decided to make a lifestyle out of it. And thank God for erosion! Because without it, there'd be "picturesque new luxury homes starting in the low 400s" right down to the banks of every river, stream, creek, and rivulet of drunken piss for five miles in every direction.

All animadversion aside, though, your suggestion of "a few hundred people [switching] from driving to walking commutes", merely upon the erection of a new highrise with good transit access, strikes me as idealistic unto sheer fantasy, at least in the context of current United States culture. I switched back to transit myself a year and a half ago, and remain very glad that I did - but it's not something that's happening on any kind of scale, nor does this situation seem likely to change soon. Getting to work via public transit and shanks' mare? That's something poor people do - poor people, a few goobers trying to make some kind of political point, and weirdos like me who grew up in nowheresville Mississippi and still sound like it after twenty years on the East Coast, and of whom it's therefore not surprising to see deviant, if harmless, behavior such as taking trains to work and following deer trails just to see where they go.

(Okay, maybe that wasn't quite all animadversion aside, and I fear I more hardly treat those whom I here sidewise describe than is quite properly their due - certainly they mean no harm, and had I not the experience that I do, I'm sure I would share the same sort of attitude I describe. But I'm having a hard time being evenhanded at the moment, because just last weekend I found one of my favorite verges had been torn up for shitty rich people condos to be defecated upon the place where it was, and this being baseball season, I'm getting a constant gutful of people slumming on my goddam trains. I suppose I should apologize for unburdening myself as I seem to have done, but what the hell? Perhaps it will elicit responses more worthwhile than the comment which inspired their origin.)

You're only going to see rich people "slumming it" in transit-oriented density because your backlash keeps the capacity in such places low.

More people living that kind of lifestyle necessarily means filling in open space within cities and building tall buildings that cast shadows. When you successfully conserve open space and protect existing residents from shadow, the rest of us stay out (as you intended), and keep driving around the sprawl we currently live in.

Do you seriously think anyone who moves to New York or San Francisco drives to work? Hell no! It would cost $1000/mo in parking alone, which would be idiotic when your home and work are connected by a few blocks or a few subway stops.

Reducing driving requires shifting the population onto land that's already occupied. There's no shortage of will to do this: that much is obvious from the market-rate rents in such places. There's a shortage of will to permit it. Everyone you successfully prevent from ruining your city's aesthetics goes on to ruin the world by staying in a place that's built around, and requires, driving everywhere all the time.

How are you simultaneously upset that rich people think public transit is beneath them, and upset that rich people are adopting transit-oriented lifestyles?

I'm not.

These developments aren't close enough to transit to entice its use - a mile, more or less, which is nothing to me but quite a bit to many. And they're not close to the kinds of jobs that you need to have in order to afford most of a half million in mortgage paper. So the built-in two-car garages will see heavy use, because the eventual inhabitants of these eyesores will drive everywhere, and one more piece of land that's been de facto commons for decades will belong to people who contribute nothing to the communities they parasitize, but for example think nothing of installing ultra-bright motion-sensing lights, at what for everyone else in eyeshot is bedroom-window level, because they harbor an unreasoning and unreasonable fear of their surroundings. And because this neighborhood is white and working class, rather than black and poor, no one will even pretend to give a damn. (Not that anyone who matters gives a damn when rich people ruin a poor black neighborhood, either. But it's fashionable in that case to pretend.)

If we were talking about downtown, or even about someplace that's within what people who do not enjoy walking for its own sake might regard as reasonable walking distance of transit, then I'd have to concede the point. But we aren't. And even if we were - those more monied types who do live near transit mostly won't use it except maybe for sporting events, which they regard as half not having to fight for parking, and half safari trip - an occasional convenience, or an exotic indulgence, rather than a commonplace worthy of investment. What do you see any of this solving?

Okay, I'll concede you're talking about a different kind of area than I thought.

> And even if we were - those more monied types who do live near transit mostly won't use it except maybe for sporting events

I don't know if you count tech workers as "monied types," but we are a huge component of the urbanization and gentrification of the Bay Area, and this absolutely isn't true for us. If anyone in my office drives to work, they hide it well. Walking is a little higher status than transit, but almost everyone uses transit.

I live in one of those new 5-story mixed-use mid-rises that everyone loves to hate, with rents that do seem to signal "monied types." In fact my neighbors are mostly young families, students, and few single yuppies like me. People with ordinary incomes absolutely live here, just with more adults per household than they'd probably like. Most of us have cars, but the garage is completely packed at noon on a weekday. They come out almost exclusively on the weekends, particularly when it's nice outside.

The actual tophat-and-monocole owner-of-land-and-means-of-production capitalists are content in their $2m single family homes, but those are authentic neighborhood character and not problematic symbols of wealth at all. The public discourse has no problem with them, but it would be political suicide to come out in favor of housing for mere high wage workers. Only the destitute (who qualify for BMR) and the oligarchy (who can afford neighborhood-character-respecting single family houses) are welcome here.

Huh. I could've sworn that at some point in this thread I had mentioned I live in Baltimore, but apparently this is not the case; no wonder we've been talking past one another. I have no idea what problems the Bay Area has, but it sounds like they're not closely similar to anything I describe.

In a prior comment in this thread, I mentioned a verge about which I later had more to say: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14666944 - tl;dr: the plot went for a song, the developer's going to make a killing, and neither the city nor its populace is going to see any meaningful part of that killing - but, this being the city it is, I'm sure whoever sold the developer a sweetheart deal will get a tidy little kickback out of it.

It's not an either-or situation. The apartment building can have many large, fast-growing deciduous (ideally fruit-bearing) trees planted on their sunny side.

And trees can make a big difference -- just think about the temperature drop when you step into a dense forest from an open meadow.

> We need a new 'Manhattan project' to find and enforce a solution.

No, we don't. Large-scale geoengineering proposals have already been made and they are like <$1B each. Many have been calculated to reduce global average temperature by multiple degrees for hundreds of years. It's completely ridiculous that everyone is still complaining about climate change. $1B is significantly less than the total cost spent worrying about these things so far, not to mention the cost of actual damage already incurred and predicted to occur.

EDIT: for starters, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_climate_engineering_to... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_engineering#Proposed_s...

If you're going to make staggering, sweeping claims, it would be nice of you to do more than link two Wikipedia articles with a bunch of undifferentiated stuff in them. How about some detailed examples of why this is so not-a-big-deal? Show some work?

>Large-scale geoengineering proposals have already been made and they are like <$1B each. Many have been calculated to reduce global average temperature by multiple degrees for hundreds of years.

Um, Source please?

Such as?

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