Dana Blankenhorn

Arborists on Offense

In cities built in forests, like Atlanta, it’s time for city arborists to go on offense.

For too long, they’ve been playing defense. That is, a developer (or homeowner) would decide to cut down some trees, and there would be a process the arborist could object to. That’s defense.

Offense is something else.

It starts with a much bigger budget. Use the money to hire summer workers who will comb the city on foot and by bike, with cameras, identifying lots without tree canopy. Fine those suckers, preferably through a property tax surtax from which they can’t escape. Those same summer workers can identify lots with a full tree canopy. These property owners can apply for a bonus, again in the form of a property tax abatement. The bonus would be smaller than the penalty, providing money for the arborist’s budget. The workers are also more likely to grow up as supporters of trees.

The arborist should also work with independent groups, like Trees Atlanta in Atlanta, to offer property owners advice on what trees they should plant where. Trees Atlanta can use existing programs to pay for those trees where people can’t afford them. And before poor people start futzing about huge trees falling on their houses, there are plenty of smaller trees to choose from.

We can argue about what defines canopy. Is it just the unbuilt areas of the property, or does it include roofs? Trees over a roof can cut cooling bills. But solar panels on a roof can do the same thing.

The arborist should also work with property owners and non-government agencies to get trees on roofs. Every flat roof can be a garden. Every small roof can have a canopy.

A city that wants to grow, expanding the amount of land that’s built-up, has a responsibility to let arborists go on offense. Otherwise, it’s part of the global warming problem. You don’t want that to be your political obituary. Or the actual one for your children.

Behind the Housing Crisis

Today’s housing crisis is the perfect storm of demographics and inefficiency driven by politics.

The demographic thing is easy. I’m 66 and I’m not moving. There are lots of us boomers. Staying alive. Enjoying our homes. This means fewer homes for younger people. Eventually we die and the baby bust enters the housing market. We become Japan. Just not now.

Housing has resisted Moore’s Law in 3 ways. Most of the costs are political.

1. State building codes keep out new building new technology. That’s politics.
2. Local zoning keeps out all but politically-connected builders. That’s politics.
3. Transactions resist automation. This can be fixed.

Right now, it can cost 15% of your equity to move. That’s about 6% on each side of the transaction, buying and selling, then 3% for the actual move. The idea of a starter home, a home for kids, then downsizing means 45% of your equity goes out the door during your life. The only people getting rich are the agents and brokers taking your money.

Real Estate is the Republican Industry

There is an industry whose interests are solidly Republican, whose actions could derail both the technology industry and democracy itself.

That’s the real estate industry.

Real estate is the most inefficient industry we have. It’s all rent seeking, from plotting with government on what to build, through construction techniques that are a century ago, to a transaction model that’s as efficient as paying alimony with pennies.

A pro-business government would make sure housing was where the jobs were. A pro-business government would encourage new building technologies. A pro-business government would minimize real estate transaction costs.

We don’t have a pro-business government. We have a government in the pocket of the real estate industry.

The reason housing costs are so high is because, in league with government, the real estate industry makes certain of it. Everything is regulated locally, meaning it’s easy to lock-out affordable housing, which thus has a bad name everywhere else. Local building codes mandate that most homes and apartments be made of sticks and separates land uses with strict zoning laws. State regulators, working on behalf of the industry, create mountains of paperwork on every real estate transaction, driving up costs and creating artificial scarcity.

Why Business is Becoming Progressive

Most people don’t know this, because the relative positions of our political parties reversed during the Civil Rights era. For most of our history, business has been on the progressive side of politics.

There are reasons. In the late 19^th century, land grant policies that opened the West were considered progressive. In the early 20^th century, regulatory regimes kept input prices low for manufacturers and were progressive. During the middle of the 20^th century, spending that kept demand high was progressive.

It was only in the second half of the last century that business became politically conservative. That’s because resource industries don’t need people. The gating factor to growth is land. Control the land and you control the oil, the minerals, the agriculture, the market. The only people you need are cops and soldiers to enforce your control over the land. The dominant political players of the Nixon era were oilmen, or resource oligarchs like the Koch Brothers.

Latinizing America’s Cities

One of the great fears I have for this decade is that our cities are about to be Latinized.

Blame the lack of gun control. Blame inequality. Blame whoever you like. Rich people, and the upper middle class, are scared to death, with good reason.

There’s also an historic opportunity opening the real estate market. The downsizing of office space looks permanent. Managers will complain, but it’s hard to see them foregoing the savings from renting less space. It’s hard to see knowledge workers forgoing the savings they get working from home. It’s not just the productivity. It’s being available 24-7, working until the job is done, rather than thinking of it from 9-5. It’s the clothes, the time wasted in driving to-and-from the job, the bad lunches. Uh, why?

What then happens to all that office space? It goes condo. It gets broken into apartments, with some co-working space and shops on the lower floors. I see a lot of security at the entrances. The steel construction, living above everyone, will make wealthy people feel safe. That’s Sao Paulo, skyscrapers and security surrounded by favelas, locks and armed guards, necessities for anyone with money.

The True Cost of Bitcoin

If America’s enemies wanted to bury this country under energy costs, it could do worse than to have invented Bitcoin.

Greed has made Bitcoin the world’s energy sink. Bitcoin uses as much energy as the country of Argentina. Most of this new Bitcoin is being produced in China, leaving most of the country dependent on coal. It’s not just China being hurt. A Bitcoin miner in Montana, a former patent troll, is keeping a local coal-fired power plant operating. 

The waste doesn’t stop there. It costs about $25 million of electricity per day to run the Bitcoin network.  The current estimate for Bitcoin energy consumption this year is over 100 Terawatts.  And it’s not just Bitcoin. Every cryptocurrency is an energy hog. 

Some cryptocoin advocates, like Ethereum inventor Vitalik Buterin, admit the truth. He wants to change Ethereum’s algorithm so it uses less electricity.

But Buterin is in the minority. Most Bitcoin advocates claim what I just wrote is a myth. It’s supposed to use a lot of energy, at first, they claim. The existing transaction networks also use energy. Bitcoin’s use will drop once it replaces every other currency. Oh, and if you’re using hydropower or “excess” power from otherwise unused sources, what’s the harm? 

This is bullshit. Bitcoin isn’t a currency. Currency values remain relatively stable during a trade, otherwise they’re useless. Bitcoin is an asset, a global index of fear and greed.

Range Anxiety

Wall Street doesn’t know this, but the electric car market is in deep trouble. 

The problem is “range anxiety.” Zoom in on this map to see where we are now. The problem is acute, even in California.

Today, most electrics are used close to home. You buy a 240-volt plug, you snuggle the car up close, and you recharge it at night, just as you do your phone. Fine if you have a house. But not everyone lives in a house.

Some apartments have opened charging stations in their garages, and there are lots of on-street 120-volt and 240-volt “free charging” places. But you can’t scale the business that way. Free chargers quickly get full as electrics cease being a curiosity. And how long are you going to give electricity away? Third (and perhaps most important) wall current takes all night to deliver a fill-up. Most stations today are delivering wall current.

Resources and the New Era: What the Best Futurists Got Wrong

This coming year represents the start of a new era.

It’s an era defined by technology, as much as the previous era was defined by resources.

I’ve written here many times that the gating factor for technology is human capital. The more trained, empowered, and willing human minds you can bring to bear, the more you can grow. Contrast this to the resource era, where the key to growth was control, over the land and what lay on or beneath it.

The politics of 2020 were defined by the clash of these two economies. It was expressed throughout the culture. But the market made its verdict clear, and it was a true landslide.

Biden’s Solar Problem

Assuming Joe Biden wins Tuesday, he has a problem.

If he doesn’t win, America and the world have a bigger problem, one I don’t think we can overcome. So, let’s assume the world goes on for a moment.

Joe’s solar problem is something the computer industry faced around the time when I was becoming a reporter, in the late 1970s. Until then, computers were capital goods. They were either leased or purchased over time with loans. Even my first PC purchase, in 1982, was with a loan.

Loans and leases built a business model that was smashed by the PC era. Both loans and leases carry huge external costs and margins. My Massapequa neighbors had nice houses and cars. Their fat sales or engineering salaries were paid for by IBM customers, who compared the cost of having IBM handle their problems to the cost of doing things manually and signed their names to lines that were dotted.

In 1981 IBM didn’t just start selling a PC. It became a computer products company. It licensed the likeness of Charlie Chaplin, who had died in 1976, from his estate. It used the rose he offered his amour in City Lights, painting it a bright red. Then it distributed the PC through computer stores, who placed it on shelves alongside the printers and other peripherals. By the 1990s you wouldn’t think of hiring a “computer specialist” to sell you stuff, unless we were talking about a networking expert who got his own hands dirty.

The Common Good

Without an overwhelming victory for democracy on November 3, I’ll be glad to die.

Trump is the ultimate expression of a basic misperception, that private goods matter more than the public goods, that national well-being matters more than global well-being, that fences and borders can isolate and separate us.

This is especially true when it comes to the environment.

My children face a bleak future unless current climate trends are reversed. But the U.S. can’t change it alone. Every country must do its part.

The ice caps’ disappearance means many cities around the world are doomed. New Orleans is doomed. Miami is doomed. New York City is doomed. So are Calcutta, Mumbai, Shanghai, and Kuala Lumpur. Sea level rise means these places will soon be underwater.

Meanwhile, the methane of the Siberian tundra is bubbling to the surface. Fires in the Amazon and West mean the Earth can no longer breathe. The “habitable” part of the U.S. will be cut by two-thirds within 50 years. The oceans are warming so that, along with overfishing, all that’s left will be jellyfish.

In past bouts of global warming, when the ice caps disappeared, nature adjusted. Cooling trends returned and nature came back. With man-made global warming, there’s no natural reversal. It takes 80 grams of energy to melt a gram of ice. Once the ice is melted, 80 grams of energy take its temperature to 112.