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The more pressing question: Can we actually still do such projects in western democracies? How long would it take until the last judge has dismissed the plea to save the nearly extinct Californian Pink Stink Beetle that by circumstance breeds in that area? How much more expensive would the project become over its ever longer runtime? What will happen when the seemingly inevitable corruption scandals are brought to daylight?

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That attitude drives me crazy. Each new high rise built in San Francisco prevents a few several blocks of nature being paved over for suburbs somewhere else.

I had this debate with an environmentalist who supported urban farming. Sure, urban farming is cool and a nice hobby, but it would be far more environmentally friendly to build a high rise. New high rises drive down the costs of urban living, more people move to the city, and whole tracts of nature are saved from destruction.

> but it would be far more environmentally friendly to build a high rise.

Absolutely Right! And, it would decrease pollution and global warming because people's commutes would be much much shorter, as they wouldn't be forced to commute from 80 miles away, like it currently is in the Bay Area.

Food and building material would still need to commute, and the amount of energy it represents probably can't be decreased enough to make dense cities a good thing for climate change.

Food needs to be transported either way. Dense cities are better because the trucks need to make less stops on the delivery end.

The number of stops is probably less important than the distance traveled by food. Towns or small cities can have food produces locally. In large cities, food has to travel across the city, and on top of that it has to travel across the space required for farming.

This is a non-concern now of course, but in a world where we want to reduce transportation at scales serious enough to fight climate change, large cities will be a liability.

Only if everybody is a subsistence farmer. If you want a modern lifestyle a large dense city is best: all the things you want from modern life are close and produced locally. The exceptions are food (food needs a lot of area to produce), and raw materials. These two are small enough that if they were our only use of transport (meaning you walk everywhere) they wouldn't affect climate change.

Building material "commuting" is a one time thing, not every day for the rest of your life like getting to work.

What we can observe in large cities is that there is a constant stream of new buildings and construction works. The "build once" model works for one building and over one lifetime, but at the scale of a large city, construction work is a constant process.

Dense cities are not envoronmentally friendly. You have to go get food further, you have to use building materials that are a major cause of pollution, etc. Any large city needs tremendous amounts of energy to work, and we have not found clean and efficient sources of energy so far.

Vertical farming could help big cities rely on less energy, but so far I don't see it being scaled to the extent we need.

How much energy does it take to actually transport food into the cities from farmland? I remember reading that the amount of resources it takes is laughably small, especially when your lettuce is coming from the other side of the country anyway.

But if you don't build in the city, you have to build outside of the city. Does it really take more resources to build a large housing complex than it takes to build an entire suburban neighborhood?

A quick search gives me numbers around 10-15% of the total food energy. But if you remove processing, some of the packaging and some of the retail energy consumption, that are in large part consequences of not having access to fresh food, this number is much larger.

The benefit of building smaller cities is that you can afford to have lettuce that comes from a couple kilometers away. If you build small cities, but still keep a distribution network that spans across continents, things will indeed not improve.

Also you compare dense cities to (american?) suburbs. Dense cities are indeed better. My point is that they are a local optimum, and one that is not good enough to offset the effects of climate change.

The model I would promote is cities small enough to rely on a short-distance farm network for most of their needs.

Dense cities are energy-dense, for sure. But in energy used per person, they do very well. Apartments touching others on all sides are efficient to heat. Elevators are much more efficient transport than cars.

>The more pressing question: Can we actually still do such projects in western democracies?

I sure hope not. Two sentences by the author dismissing environmental concerns isn't sufficient.

They also list Boston as an example, but Boston's land creation projects ran over cost back in the 1800's, which most people seem to think is only a modern day issue for some reason. The Back Bay was filled-in because the city had already created an environmental disaster out of it. A dam was built which caused the bay to stagnate, and fill with sewage. Maybe a judge should've ordered an environmental impact study be done before the dam was built, which would've caught this. https://historyofmassachusetts.org/how-boston-lost-its-hills...

You don't need to create land in order to have a functioning public transit system, which would address several of the problems the author brings up, without introducing a plethora of new issues.

how do you have a transit system to get people 80 miles to work? The imbalance of where work and residential areas are in the bay area is so horrendous, there's 1 residential place to live for every 4 jobs on the peninsula. The only way to balance it out is either get rid of the jobs or build lots lots more residential

>> The more pressing question: Can we actually still do such projects in western democracies?

> I sure hope not. Two sentences by the author dismissing environmental concerns isn't sufficient.

That's typifies a problem I have with internet pseudo-"rationality." The world is messy and and composed of lots of legitimate, competing political interests. The only way you can hope to offer a simple, "rational" solution in a pithy blog post is by ignoring or handwaving away a huge amount alternate perspectives and history, which actually isn't rational at all.

[1] The reason I bring this up is because the article is a blog post on LessWrong, which describes itself as "a place to 1) develop and train rationality, and 2) apply one’s rationality to real-world problems."

I would not want to take a wager on whether this sort of project could be done in San Francisco. China, I am certain, could do it. If it were an Army Corps of Engineers project on the Mississippi or the deep South, I'd give it 50-50 odds.

We do seem to have no ability to do any sort of large scale projects. They built the Empire State Building in under a year in the 1930s, and meanwhile it's taken ten and counting to replace a bridge where I live today. The technical ability is there, there's just no will to get anything done.

I agree with your general point, but it's worth mentioning 2 points on the Empire State Building example: 1) Depending on where you draw the line for starting the ESB, it was 16 months. 2) Look at building sites in NYC today (which can still build skyscrapers effectively), and compare them with pictures from the 30s. MUCH better health and safety, both for workers and nearby pedestrians. At least 5, and as many as 14, people died during construction.

Some of the reasons things take longer today are actually good!

Fourteen people dying to lay ten and a quarter million bricks and thousands of tons of steel is not much of a butcher's bill.

I'd bet that more people would die in car accidents getting to the work site over the extended construction time today.

Even if that were true, perhaps the answer is to reduce vehicle deaths rather than increase construction deaths. Just so you can get your bridge sooner.

Is the situation actually much better today?

> 21% / 991 of 4693 Work Deaths In The US Were In Construction (2016) http://www.imectechnologies.com/2018/07/30/construction-safe...

Yes. Tens of thousands of people died per year in construction and industrial deaths in the 1910s, 20s, and 30s, with a much smaller population. Yes, construction is still disproportionately risky, but...
Two deaths to build 1 WTC, vs 60 deaths to build the Twin Towers (4x the square footage), vs 5-14 deaths to build the Empire State Building (80% the square footage). Most ordinary skyscrapers have zero, which wasn't the case 100 years ago.

I seriously doubt any substantial part of the slowdowns are caused by improved worker safety. Yes there is a correlation between those two trends, but as we all know, that doesn't prove causation.
We have enormously better technology today than in the 30s, and should be able to put of a skyscraper in 1/4 of the time. I understand that's more or less what China does.

But sometimes China has things like this happen: https://failedarchitecture.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/22...

It's actually quite impressive that it managed to stay in one piece. It implies a scary-dangerous brittle failure mode for the structure, and horrible engineering, but still impressive.

Hundreds of thousands of highrises were built there, one collapse doesn't mean much.

I think we still do these projects all the time, in cities of a certain development level, for the same reason we always did them: industry lobbying. This land was, almost always, reclaimed by heavy industry, for industrial use; and only later, once that industry no longer had need of it (and was being gentrified out of the area entirely) was the land re-zoned for other uses and “finished off” as a public works project.
Residential or commercial developers have never been given authorization to reclaim coastline, AFAIK. And governments very rarely do it themselves, save for when they’re essentially serving the role of an infrastructure provider to some later industry (e.g. an airport.)

Singapore does it. But they are special in so many other regards, too.
(Oh, and the Dutch of course.)

New Orleans lakefront and parts of New Orleans East were massive land building projects, specifically for neighborhoods. Lakefront Airport (KNEW) was also included in these projects. The land was sold to finance the levees before federal law put the Army Corps of Engineers in charge of levee building, ~1965.
http://richcampanella.com/assets/pdf/Picayune_Cityscapes_201...
https://neworleanshistorical.org/items/show/603
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakeshore/Lake_Vista,_New_Or...
Edit: I can't find the source, but the levee board still has title and standing permission from the state to fill-in something like an additional 2 miles out into Lake Pontchartrain.

The parallel with Mauna Kea is too tempting to not be mentioned!

But apparently not tempting enough to give details or show how it is in fact parallel.

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