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Six goals for making Salem, Oregon a much better place - HinesSight
http://hinessight.blogs.com/hinessight/2015/02/six-goals-for-making-salem-oregon-a-much-better-place.html
I would revise 6 to read "Discourage Unused and Underused Space by Charging Owners for Degrading The City" -- instead of putting the city even more into the "subsidy for business" business, we let the market figure out what's best, by forcing building owners to pay a rising fee monthly for each month after a minimum (3?) that a developed lot or storefront within the downtown core remains vacant or underused.
The money would go into funds for downtown projects, so it would benefit the downtown businesses indirectly, and help ameliorate the burden they bear because other building owners let their properties be idle so long, exerting a drag on all downtown businesses.
In this way, instead of promoting graft and city government cronyism, we get a uniform, transparent policy that will strongly incent landlords to find and keep suitable tenants downtown, or sell to someone who will use the space themselves or wants to be a better landlord at rents the market is willing to pay.
Right now, we're suffering from landlords who aren't paying high enough carrying charges on their buildings, so they're fine with no rent coming in too long. Rather than raise taxes generally, we should simply penalize the landlords who impose costs on downtown with their refusals to bring the rents down enough to get a tenant into the space.
"Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay."
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The low-carbon fuels scam is wishful thinking turned into policy at its most destructive. Biofuels are nothing more than a Rube Goldberg system for using vast areas of land to convert fossil fuels into disguised fossil fuels, while extracting a fortune in money, at the cost of mass mining of irreplaceable topsoil and creation of biological dead zones precisely where life was once most abundant. In a world where hunger and collapse of biological diversity already loom, organizing things so as to further expand biofuel-driven mono cropping will only accelerate mass species extinctions.
The more we pretend that we can supplement fossil fuels with these disguised fossil fuels (petroleum and nat gas energy converted to corn to be converted back to hydrocarbons, with subsidies and toxic pollution galore), the more we are preventing the transition away from fossil fuels.
An important graphic about biodiesel that everyone concerned about a livable planet needs to see.
http://home.comcast.net/~russ676/biodiesel/bob.html
So the advocates of the low carbon fuels standard are, like their cousins in the anti-vax movement and the faith healing cults, not intending to do harm. But they do great harm anyway.
If you want to strike back at Big Oil, don't buy into the fantasy that we can keep living in Big Oil's kind of world -- a world where even the poorest among us have cars and must drive them everywhere -- without paying for our fantasy.