I think that's because we've made it politically difficult to build transmission. In the United States, you have to get approval from every jurisdiction and landowner along the route, so valuable transmission lines are politically impossible to build. (See: SOO Green, Grain Belt Express, BECI, other planned lines).
Oil and gas pipelines are centrally approved by FERC, so there is no such difficulty. It doesn't have to be so difficult to build transmission, and it would unlock a lot of wind and solar development.
The Grain Belt Express has been in limbo for 15 years now, despite backing from Invenergy. It has recently taken hits from President Trump, Senator Hawley, and Missouri's AG.
Oh, you see, that's wind energy. No one can charge for the wind, so they don't like it. You can't build big expensive wind drilling machines and keep big vats of wind for bad days.
The tax on fuel has not been able to keep up with expenditures for the Highway Trust Fund for two decades; now a third of the money comes from the General Fund.
they aren't putting as much in as the city by call kinds of measures. It generally cost up to 4-5x to maintain suburban areas vs urban. High income suburbanites don't make up that difference. They're subsubdized by the urban citizens.
The suburbanites pay for that maintenance, and there are many other costs to city living that urbanites like to ignore (significantly higher expenses on emergency and social services for example). It's not nearly as straightforward as urbanites like to claim.
One thing that is absolutely clear is that commercial districts subsidize residents in every jurisdiction, and urban commercial districts rely on commuters (from surrounding suburbs) to thrive.
It says in the linked article that they only have support for 9 cities so far, and they list them as:
Spokane, WA
Syracuse, NY
South Bend, IN
Bellingham, WA
Morgantown, WV
Cincinnati, OH
St Paul, MN
Rochester, NY
New York City, NY
It also says that they are working on improving the data pipeline so that they can reduce the amount of time it takes to add new cities to their dataset and visualization.
Nooo... we have a bunch of metrics and logs reporting systems at my company. Some of them are in UTC, some of them display my local time, some of them display China Time, and I'm trying to collaborate with colleagues in London and Australia who get data displayed in their local times as well. When I'm working to address an incident and combing through multiple systems to try to correlate events, it's a pain in the ass having to constantly double-check which time zone this data is in.
Zephyr Teachout wrote an early article critiquing Abundance, the book by Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein. She appeared on Ezra's podcast and (IMHO) did not appear to have thought very deeply about the problem of housing affordability; instead defaulting to "monopoly in housing construction" as the problem. Stoller and Musharbash are re-iterating the position that had been staked out by Zephyr Teachout in March.
> Let’s assume that reforming rules on setbacks, parking, single-family zoning, and local input would achieve what they desire (the evidence is not straightforward; cities that have these reforms have lower costs, but they are rising at the same rate as in other cities). It would still seem relatively small-bore as a novel solution: Half of the 10 biggest cities in America—many in Texas—already have a zoning and procedural regime fairly close to what Klein and Thompson want. Are they simply arguing that Dems embracing Texas zoning approaches would transform national politics? That can’t be it.
Much of the criticism of Abundance from prominent pundits on The Left (including Teachout and Nathan Robinson) has been along the lines of "the actual problem is corporate monopoly" rather than zoning. (Or maybe: "zoning is an easy problem to fix and a distraction from the real problem of corporate monopoly".)
I remember in 2015 watching this great tsunami video at a harbor. It was about 11 minutes long.
At the start, there's just a white line at the horizon. Then the fishing boats in the harbor start rocking and jangling. Then water starts pouring over some walkways and sea walls.
Eventually the cameraman backs away and starts climbing a concrete tower; water starts to flood over the area where they had been standing. I think they climb a couple stories and are safe up there.
I haven't been able to find the video in years, but I remember being fascinated by it and I'd love to watch it again.
Edit: I never expected to find that video again, but here it is. A little more terrifying than I remember.
If China is manufacturing solar panels for us, that doesn't give them control of our energy supply.
It's not like being dependent on Saudi Arabia to supply oil. If China cuts us off from new solar panels, the solar panels we already have continue to provide electricity. It would only slow the rate of deployment, which we're already doing to ourselves by imposing a tariff on solar panel imports.
Some of the housing regulations were legitimately put in place for safety reasons to protect people. Others were put in place to keep black and Asian people out. Especially after government initiatives to prevent discrimination in housing like the 1968 Fair Housing Act, efforts to keep out minorities became cloaked in the garb of "public safety", and minority-excluding regulations were sanitized into affordability-excluding regulations.
but it's a lot more than that. Blue cities are by far the worst offenders at anti-housing regulations. part of it must be that people are funadamentally extremely conservative when it comes to housing.
Oil and gas pipelines are centrally approved by FERC, so there is no such difficulty. It doesn't have to be so difficult to build transmission, and it would unlock a lot of wind and solar development.