Mixing urban redesign and energy politics

Daniel Gross has an interesting article on Slate (posted yesterday), Degenerating Situation - Why blackouts and gas shortages are very modern inventions. At the begining, it follows on theme of the Slate Chatterbox piece of last week that knocked Bill Richardson by saying it was, indeed, a first-world blackout and not a "third-world electrical grid" blackout. The Gross piece says that the blackout problem is a 21st century problem and not a 20th century problem.

OK, maybe it is a stretch comparing those two articles but the first brought to mind the second and I hadn't posted the second. I like the Gross article because it brings in the complexity of the energy problem. We want cheap, reliable fuel and electricity to run our increasing number of appliances and larger automobiles but we don't want the air pollution or the industrial development that is required to keep them cheap and reliable.

In a way it is an environmental victory that people will not accept power plants and power lines in their backyard. People understand that pollution lowers their quality of life. People understand that they don't want to live under a power line or dine next to a power plant.

But I see it as a problem that people do not seem to connect their choices to the environmental impacts. If we want 3AM in Times Square to be lit up like it is the middle of the day, we need to burn more of something somewhere. As I see it, we can keep on fighting having the generation capacity or the pipelines or the powerlines in our backyards and have more blackouts or we can start connecting consumption with power and make difficult decisions about how much we value our goods over pollution.