Growing Green

A pretty insightful Tom Friedman column notes that what we really need from India (and China) is for economic growth there to be paired with an effort to leapfrog the United States in terms of green development, with rising national income going into high-speed trains and clean, efficient mass transit infrastructure rather than into building the sort of vast network of highways, parking lots, gas stations, and car-dependent sprawl that we have.

In principle, this should be doable. Transitioning a place like the United States to a more green-friendly country is very challenging precisely because so many of us have so much invested already in high-carbon lifestyles. If India just puts sensible policies in place in terms of road and parking pricing, land use, and transit funding then Indians ought to be able to painlessly grow richer in an ecologically sustainable manner. After all, since right now Indians are mostly getting by without either cars or quality transit options, it's not a question of giving anything up. Obviously, though, nothing along these lines is going to happen unless the right countries — and especially the richest country of all — shows a determination to start moving away from our current model.

Comments

Two comments:

If India just puts sensible policies in place in terms of road and parking pricing, land use, and transit funding...

It means "government puts sensible policies (and funding) in place", right? Then the ideological assault on government as necessarily bad, taxation as an evil, and government funding as plain wrong have to cease. Indians are no less likely to fall prey to Ayn Rand than Americans.

http://arunsmusings.blogspot.com/2007/08/km-munshi-and-ayn-rand.html

... then Indians ought to be able to painlessly grow richer in an ecologically sustainable manner.

I don't know about painless. Reworking old cities I don't think can be painless.

Posted by Arun | November 4, 2007 2:18 PM

I agree with the doability part, but until the US becomes a bit more humble and is willing to adopt a "don't make the same mistakes we did" approach, other developing countries look to our excesses as a goal, not something to be avoided.

Also, so long as we insist that not only should we have more than one car per person, but that they should be big and cheap oil is our birthright, well, our leverage to get environmental policies adopted in the fastest growing economies are going to be met with (justified) derision.

Reminds me of a student friend from Brazil when we were discussing the disappearing Amazon. She said "you cut down your trees, now we are going to cut down ours." Pretty blunt, but also pretty hard to argue with, especially when asking others to be smarter than we were while simultaneously proclaiming our right to continue to live dumbly with regards to enviornamental concerns.

Posted by abject funk | November 4, 2007 2:45 PM

Anything you can say about India is true. Any advice that you can give to India is also likely to be good for the country.

However, it would be somewhat understandable if the Indians completely ignore this sort of advice to a billion people coming from someone sitting pretty in an exclusive Manhattan enclave.

Posted by gregor | November 4, 2007 2:52 PM

Matt, I am going to have to trust you that this particular column was insightful. You are really doing the rest of us a service by posting on the 2 or 3 good things Friedman writes in a year and summarizing them. That means we can completely avoid ever clicking on his columns.

Posted by d | November 4, 2007 3:03 PM

Talking about Manhattan: just a light rail up Lexington, Third, Sixth and Eighth Avenues for instance, instead of those creaky, cumbersome buses, with limited access for cars, would do wonders to the pollution level of that burg. But no way. The rotten subway system stays rotten and the cars keep rolling. It is unacceptable hypocrisy that anyone dares to tell India and China what to do while the U.S. goes its merry polluting way.

Posted by Quentin | November 4, 2007 3:07 PM

A pretty insightful Tom Friedman column notes that what we really need from India (and China) is for economic growth there to be paired with an effort to leapfrog the United States in terms of green development...

Plus a pony!

Posted by Econobuzz | November 4, 2007 3:40 PM

'Reminds me of a student friend from Brazil when we were discussing the disappearing Amazon. She said "you cut down your trees, now we are going to cut down ours."'

I live in Brazil, and that´s a common thinking both in the lef and in the right.

Posted by André Kenji | November 4, 2007 4:03 PM

The Onion had a piece a while ago which looks very much like Friedman's piece.

Posted by jim | November 4, 2007 4:18 PM

Public transportation is generally an awful experience and most people, when provided an option for a car, will rarely make use of it.

I suspect Indians are the same, especially given how crowded some of their cities are.

Posted by Nim | November 4, 2007 4:38 PM

"Obviously, though, nothing along these lines is going to happen unless the right countries — and especially the richest country of all — shows a determination to start moving away from our current model."

I really don't see what Luxembourg has to do with this.

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2004rank.html

Posted by minderbender | November 4, 2007 4:41 PM

If India just puts sensible policies in place in terms of road and parking pricing, land use, and transit funding then Indians ought to be able to painlessly grow richer in an ecologically sustainable manner.

Well, India will have to do a lot more than opt for trains instead of cars. Transporting people and goods in an ungreen, American-fashion contributes to climate change, no doubt. But things like heating and cooling buildings, agriculture, and manufacturing are collectively much bigger energy wasters in industrial societies than inefficient transportation.

Posted by Jasper | November 4, 2007 4:48 PM

The really striking thing about this post is the ethnocentricity of the author.

"Obviously, though, nothing along these lines is gong to happen unless the right countries- and especially the richest country of all-"

Uh, not. Beijing is building 90 miles of subway. Another Chinese city is starting with 110 miles of subway as the first step on a 500-mile system. A rapid-transit spine development between Hong Kong and their airport has 10 million residents. Shanghai has a Maglev in operation.

The right-wing president of France has called for a moratorium on road and airport building, and for the construction of more rail transit and TGV. The head of the bus rapid transit agency in Curitabo admits there are things BRT can't do and the city is building light rail.

Our concern now is not to set a good example, but to learn from good examples. By most measures, people no longer want to be like us.

It's good of Matt to realize that a command economy could leapfrog decades of suburban development, not so good that he's confused about the direction in which information needs to flow.

Posted by serial catowner | November 4, 2007 4:57 PM

A pretty insightful Tom Friedman column notes that what we really need from India (and China) is for economic growth there to be paired with an effort to leapfrog the United States in terms of green development, with rising national income going into high-speed trains and clean, efficient mass transit infrastructure rather than into building the sort of vast network of highways, parking lots, gas stations, and car-dependent sprawl that we have.

That sentence is hideous. Maybe it could've read:

An insightful Tom Friedman column suggests that China and India should emphasize green development alongside economic growth, and invest in trains and mass transit instead of the vast network of car-dependent sprawl we have here.

You know, without so much circumlocution or so many clunky adverbs or anything.

Posted by decoud | November 4, 2007 5:17 PM

I saw the title "Growing Green" and I thought your post would be about sinsemilla.

Posted by Bob Marley | November 4, 2007 5:30 PM

Dictatorial China is rapidly developing its transportation infrastructure, such as the maglev train to the Shanghai airport. Democratic India is a mess in terms of infrastructure.

Posted by Steve Sailer | November 4, 2007 5:59 PM

Sailer -- yes, but in India, if the government decided peremptorily to dam the Ganges, drive hundreds of thousands out of their homes and flood areas of priceless cultural treasure, all for a dam that is in severe danger of silting up anyway and threatens to exacerbate numerous environmental problems, you're damn well (sorry) be sure you'd see popular resistance. And that resistance is pretty likely to stop that dam.

On the other hand, democracy killed Socrates, so it's not perfect.

Posted by Ben Cronin | November 4, 2007 6:37 PM

"If India just puts sensible policies in place in terms of road and parking pricing, land use, and transit funding then Indians ought to be able to painlessly grow richer in an ecologically sustainable manner."

Not really. India, like China, is chock full of cheap dirty coal. It (they) will burn the cheap dirty coal to make electricity. Its (their) cheap dirty coal has nothing to do with driving cars.

Sensible "parking pricing" (ha! sensible third world parking pricing) would help cut down on car-generated pollution, but would do nothing about the cheap dirty coal.

Posted by ostap | November 4, 2007 8:45 PM

After all, since right now Indians are mostly getting by without either cars or quality transit options

Funniest thing I've read in a looong time. There's prolly about 20 million cars in the Delhi metropolitan area alone...

Posted by foo | November 5, 2007 1:27 AM

'Reminds me of a student friend from Brazil when we were discussing the disappearing Amazon. She said "you cut down your trees, now we are going to cut down ours."'

That's a really difficult argument to answer. The West industrialised on its own terms, so why don't India, China and South America have the right to do the same? Yes, there's the argument that they don't need to make the mistakes of those who went beforehand, and that they have the advantage of a technological smorgasbord to choose from. But the issue is one of autonomy.

In short: India and China are going to industrialise on their own terms, because they see it as their right to do so, and they really don't give a shit about what Tom Friedman has to say.

Posted by pseudonymous in nc | November 5, 2007 2:16 AM

The words "insightful" and "Tom Friedman" do not belong in the same sentence. "Patronising" and "ignorant" perhaps, but not "insightful". If you look at the massive increase in car ownership in China over the past decade you will see that (surprise) just like most people elsewhere in the world, when they can afford it, the Chinese want to get around by car. And similarly in Inida. It is only the academic middle class members of the urban elite who are against cars. Fine, if you don't like cars, then promise never to use one. Meanwhile, back in the real world, real people want to use real cars.

Posted by wab | November 5, 2007 2:59 AM

One observation: if new economies will grow with much larger energy efficiency than we have here, they will be able to pay more for the increasingly scarce hydrocarbons. So it would be in OUR interest that to get "leapfrogged" but to make a leap of our own.

However, Friedman was proposing it too. In general, a nation can show its greatness, or the lack of it, by its ability to follow Friedman's advise or not.

If Friedman ever errs it is because this truism is not obvious to all. So it happened that he absolutely correctly concluded that Iraq should be invaded, but only if it is done right, and described very succintly what "right means". To his dismay, the Administration ignored the more detailed part of advise, which itself was not a grave problem: they should realize after a little while that something is wrong, and then they would start to follow his wisdom and things would turn right.

Why people would ignore friendly, succint are wise advise to their own detriment, Friedman unit after Friedman unit, is hard to comprehend.

Posted by piotr | November 5, 2007 6:42 AM

Whenever I think about AGW, my feelings are always the same: fatalism. Whatever it is that 3C (or more!) of warming will do, we'll get. There's no friggin' way we're going to avoid the full load of warming. There's too many competing interests. Too many cynical people with power and the knowledge that they won't be around when the bill comes due. The future's execrations mean nothing compared to the present's ease.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | November 5, 2007 9:49 AM

Putting things:

1-) The problem of Curitiba BRT is that it works well for small cities, not highly dense areas. That´s the problem of public transportation in Brazil: EVERYTHING is done using bus, even when they are not appropriated.

It´s a good solution for cities like Des Moines or Omaha, but a growing metropolis like Houston or San Diego requires heavier and more expensive solutions.

2-) The problem of a rainforest is that it takes fair more time to recover than a forest in the Siberian Taiga or in Idaho.

But people usually thinks that foreigners should be meddling in their national affairs...

3-) if you have a proper transit policy, people will use it. At least when it´s more desirable, like everyday commuting, where you can work or sleep while commuting.

The problem is that you can´t have buses that are only slightly cheaper than cars and more slowly...

Posted by André Kenji | November 5, 2007 12:05 PM

The prophet that won't stay dead: Leon Trotsky called such historical leapfrogging, "The Advantage of Backwardness." In Oregon we said, "Let's not Californicate ourselves." My grandmother called it, "Learning from other peoples mistakes." It's simple, but it ain't easy.

Posted by buddy66 | November 5, 2007 4:00 PM

If India just puts sensible policies in place...

India and sensible policies? Ha!

Posted by Naveen | November 5, 2007 5:35 PM