Herding the Poor

Bad answers spoken authoritatively and piously will get you a long way in the world but, eventually, in a free society, you will get exposed.  Take this piece from the anti-planner.

TransForm, a smart-growth group in Oakland, has analyzed California's household travel survey data and made what it thinks is a fascinating discovery: poor people drive less than rich people. Moreover, poor people especially drive less than rich people if they live in a high-density development served by frequent transit.

 According to TransForm's report, poor households who live in transit-oriented developments (TODs) drive only half as much as poor households who live away from TODs, while rich households who live in TODs drive about two-thirds as much as rich households who don't live near TODs (see figure 1 on page 7).

 Based on this, TransForm has a modest proposal: build lots of "affordable housing" in the TODs, then herd encourage poor people to live in those TODs. Apparently, TransForm's thinking is that moving poor people into TODs will have the greatest effect on driving, energy consumption, and greenhouse gas emissions. Putting "more affordable homes near transit ... would be a powerful and durable GHG reduction strategy" says TransForm (emphasis in the original).

 Anyone associated with this report should back away in embarrassment. First, TransForm has committed a simple arithmetic error when it concludes that the best greenhouse-gas reduction strategy would be to focus on low-income people. Though the data show rich people in TODs drive only a third less than rich people away from TODs, the rich drive so much more than the poor that the greatest impact would come from herding the rich to the TODs.

It gets better from there.  Read the whole thing.

From the New York Times

Ignoring the mistakes of the policy recomendations, look at what it reveals about the writers.

The problem is the them, the other, the poor.

Solutions require changing other kinds of people, not for the likes of the white-collar, college grads with enlightened opinions.  They can jet around the world, the poor should be discouraged from driving cars.

Privilege for the clergy, enforced piety for the peasantry.

It is classism at its most base, unjust, and unreflective.  Soup for me, but none for you.  My kid will vacation on Bali, you should not drive your own to little league practice.

It is almost enough to make you wanna holler.

It is enough to make this man stop grumbling to himself and say something.

Saturated Fat and "Settled Science"

They always claim to be on the side of "settled" truth.

Beware anyone who feels the need, in the name of science, to use shame in an attempt to shut down those who disagree.  As more and more studies call into question the link, thirty years after it was considered settled science, between saturated fat and heart disease, what other bits of received scientific wisdom might be up for question.

Of course I am alluding to the catastrophic warmists who fill the void left vacant by the death of that old time Puritan fundamentalism.  They, like Jonathon Edwards, believe that humanity hangs like a spider suspended by a thread in the hand of an angry god.  Once upon a time you might be sentenced to wear a scarlet letter or drowned as a witch for disrespecting the received wisdom of God's prophet.  Today too many direct questions and you are labeled a "denier."

This is not to say that eating bacon double cheese burgers everyday is good for your health or that burning dinosaur bones is without ecological consequence.  It only goes to demonstrate that complex systems, like the human body and global climate, are truly complex and attempts to simplify them lead to false conclusions.

It also demonstrates that those advocates who are the most strident, the most ready to overstate their case, should not be trusted with the power to govern our lives, or even to set the terms of public debate.  It matters little if the fundamentalism they espouse is Calvinist, Nurtitionist, Warmist; or any other human ideological classification, it all comes from the same place in the human heart.  Where there is the absence of humility there lies the seed that we must be dictated to, for our own good of course.