Stop The Carbon Tax

Some notes (and not a criticism, but some thoughts as I work on this stuff for my job):

Rain harvesting on new homes is tricky. For example many many planning agencies have issues with cisterns. So while you can harvest rain in lots of ways doing so for drinking water, or making standing water available to mosquitoes is often heavily regulated. Incidentally rain harvesting has already begun as a federal standard through federally mandated C-3 requirements for stormwater. What is interesting about this as an environmentalist is that one of the leading motivations for this is not environmental, but a public infrastructure problem.

Rebuilding communities to be walkable is an extraordinary expense. As a government program this would dwarf everything else. I think the problem is that regional and urban planning departments are weak while unfortunately often operating completely at the whim of "machine politics" and caving into developers demands. The way Walmart has presented their developments being a well publicized example, but they are by no means the "big" problem here. Its an entire system of corruption in public process that has been part of urban development in the United States from the beginning. I say all this to demonstrate how difficult this is, and therefore why no top down solution will get anywhere. Getting involved at the local level will make headway as long as you have enough of the community interested. The problem here is keeping sufficient numbers of people interested indefinitely.

Local Organic Farming - great idea but all that can be accomplished at the federal level is to have real organic food standards such as those established in the state of California. The USDA standards are meaningless despite what the people at Whole Paycheck and Trader Joes tell you. And for local farming to really bloom requires a rural renaissance which has not made much headway in this country. I suspect it needs to be shed of its hippie navel gazing roots and be adopted by real people in the conservative rural areas. How the Fed could foster this without being seen as a threat however... I have no idea. The Fed doesn't operate well with projects that should be grassroots. What you do about large scale agribusiness is also tricky. They typically control food processing, harvesting, and distribution for wide areas. Do you break them down into smaller pieces? That doesn't seem fair at all. The interesting thing however is that many growers are localized and sell to agribusiness. If anything, thats a good place to start. If growers felt that alternative markets were more attractive than present day agri-business corps, you might see change.