Smart Growth and Green Growth - It Is Not What You Think

 

“Global Sustainability requires the deliberate quest of poverty, reduced resource consumption, and set levels of mortality control.”   -  Professor Maurice King

Progressives (regressives) have been educating (indoctrinating) our American children for decades, inculcating (forcing) ideas such as political correctness (approved speech), globalism (one world government), global warming/climate change (redistribution of wealth), income equality (confiscation of wealth), resistance (anarchy), social justice (reverse discrimination), and tolerance (intolerance).

Progressivism has generally succeeded in creating a few generations of snowflakes (melting babies given to tantrums) and college graduates whose degrees were expensive and useless. But nobody is complaining about higher education escalating costs and globalist indoctrination.

Progressives have been urging their followers to make everything smart (U.N. compliant), to learn to deal with water shortages (water usage control) and to plan for green growth (control and destruction of property rights).

Progressives and their U.N.-affiliated organizations have preached to impressionable youth that it is for the common good (collectivism) and advanced the cause of global citizenship (U.N.-dependent global migrant). Teachers have been quite busy attacking patriotism, nationalism, and sovereignty while promoting destruction of one’s culture and history. https://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/education/item/23333-un-global-citizenship-education-plan-pushes-social-justice

Smart growth/green growth (controlling and destroying property rights) has been pushed in local communities unaware of the globalist “sustainable visioning” (global communism) and “nudged” (forced) under the guise that the community had actually demanded it and voted for it.

Free grant money from the federal and state government came with sustainability strings attached to preserve farm land (take it out of production via conservation easements). Once the farmers received free money, they were not allowed to develop their own land or produce crops on it.

Smart Growth imposed population diversity (government-mandated race and ethnic balance), encouraged in every neighborhood through HUD’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH). https://www.huduser.gov/portal/affht_pt.html

Obama’s administration combed neighborhoods to record income levels, religious affiliations, and racial and ethnic composition. If a neighborhood was not diverse enough for their liking, policies were put in place to diversify it.

Local government’s social engineering plans forced people to live in denser populated mixed-use communities on smaller tracts of land per unit in order to eliminate the need to commute to work, school, shopping, or play.

The idea behind such social engineering was that areas more densely populated have less mobility and are easier to control. It is exactly what communists did during decades of forced Stalinization, with disastrous results for the population forced off their lands into high-rise concrete block apartments.

Social engineering was amply addressed in U.N. Agenda 21 (1992) which morphed into Agenda 2030 (2015). This newer version expanded the idea that urban sprawl (suburbia) is dangerous to the environment and the planet. Their Smart Growth/Green Growth plans emphasized the implementation of walkable communities, rail trails, bike paths, “complete streets,” “strong communities,” and other visions of utopia, using various organizations such as the National Association of Realtors (NAR) and the American Planning Association (APA). https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/Agenda21.pdf

NAR is part of the Smart Growth Network which also includes the EPA, National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), American Farmland Trust, Rails to Trails Conservancy, and the State of Maryland. http://smartgrowth.org/category/partner-spotlight-archives-page/

What would Smart Growth/Green Growth do? The euphemisms behind the real concepts sound placid enough. The propaganda materials say that the community will be beautiful, well-controlled, with high-rises and shopping within biking and walking distance, a quaint ride on a trolley to the market, “wind turbines turning lazily in the background to supply all energy needs,” solar panels on every roof, no “dirty smokestacks, no cars, no parking nightmares, no gridlock, no urban sprawl, no crime, everyone lives in perfect harmony.”

As our own county advertised, “The Potomac Community Design Guidelines and Vision of a New Woodbridge have long called for mixed-use developments based on Smart Growth principles, such as transit-oriented development and connecting neighborhoods to amenities such as parks and entertainment hubs.”

The advertised “Principles of Smart Growth” happen to coincide with those of U.N. Agenda 21:

-         Mixed land use

-         Compact building design

-         Walkable neighborhoods

-         Preserve open space, farmland, natural beauty, and critical environmental areas (if farmland is preserved, who is going to grow food?)

-         Varied transportation choices (rail, buses, bikes, all reducing mobility for Americans who are in love with their roads and cars)

-         Less or no parking, thus forcing people to give up their cars (many “stack and pack” high-rise tiny apartments have no elevators and no parking)

-         Segregate the rich who can afford to buy expensive homes in Eco-Villages, away from “stack and pack” high rises where the poor will be housed.

Globalists want to make “holistic” decisions with land use and transportation using Smart Scale Grants, promising to alleviate congestion. All the problems in our county could be easily solved if highway 1 and I-95 would be enlarged; they are the only major roads that carry traffic for locals and for those in transit between states.

The “stack-and-pack” living in a 200 square foot aPodments high-rise in Sammamish, Washington is described by a resident who “shares the kitchen with seven other tenants on the second floor.” To get to a loft cubicle, she must climb six flights of stairs in the absence of elevators. Cars are not allowed because of global warming. The micro-apartments are smaller than a hotel room, rent for $600-900 per month, and contribute to the population density rise in the area.

According to Tom DeWeese, President of the American Policy Center, The American Planning Association (APA) commissioned a study of Smart Growth policies and it concluded that they do not work. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01944360903409584?journalCode=rjpa20

But the Smart Growth planners in your area keep telling you that you live the wrong way, you are not living the green and smart way.  And there is the nagging question, why exactly do we have to “harmonize” our local, regional, state, and federal Smart Growth development plans to fit the United Nation’s Agenda 2030? Why must we live the way the third world U.N. bureaucrats dictate?

The state and local planners receive ample grants to entice and convince them that “cities and human settlements must be made inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable.”

The U.N. Agenda 2030’s sustainable goal number 11.7 supports “positive economic, social, and environmental links between urban, peri-urban, and rural areas by strengthening national and regional development planning.” https://una-gp.org/clancyt/files/goals/goal11.pdf

How are these global directives translating into smart growth regional or urban planning in your area? As Tom DeWeese pointed out, all you have to do is look at Portland to see the “stack and pack” smart growth results where the “complete street,” “traffic calming,” and “strong communities” are in full effect, “on one side is a vast, dense development,” with high-rise, mixed-use buildings, and “on the other side is nothing but open land.”

“The result of Portland’s grand plan is that its increased density destroyed the entire livable atmosphere of the community. Congestion is worse, housing and consumer costs are higher, and urban services, including fire, police, and schools, have declined as the city took money from these programs to subsidize high-density developers.” https://americanpolicy.org/2015/01/05/private-property-rights-and-socialism-do-not-mix/

In our county more and more apartments are crowded per acre despite the scarce highways and traffic bottlenecks; the entire area is significantly congested by condos and apartments which fill every available space that is not occupied by wildlife and state parks.

Preserving the farmland, not for agriculture purposes but placing it in private environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs) trusts’ control for future generations, is locking it in “conservation easements” in perpetuity in which the landowner, according to a specific contract, must ask permission to do anything on his property.

As Tom DeWeese described, “if the Smart Growth plans are fully implemented, as advocated by the APA and NAR, density in American cities will be as much as three times higher than those currently in New York City.”

 

 

Water and the Climate Change Industry

“The water you drink today has likely been around in one form or another since dinosaurs roamed the Earth, hundreds of millions of years ago.” – National Geographic

“Water which is too pure has no fish.” - Anonymous

Water is life and it is recyclable, covering 70 percent of our planet; 2.5 percent is fresh water and “only 1 percent is easily accessible, the rest is trapped in glaciers and snowfields.” National Geographic noted that freshwater is in crisis because levels have remained the same over millennia but the human population has exploded to seven billion and thus water use based on population size and animal use is unsustainable. http://environment.nationalgeographic.com/environment/freshwater/freshwater-crisis/

The climate change industry is growing exponentially, shaped and driven by U.N.’s Agenda 2030, relentlessly introduced, reintroduced, renamed, and first signed by 178 nations in 1992 as Agenda 21. This agenda is driven not by the “saving the planet” narrative, but by global social engineering control and redistribution of wealth to third world nations.

The lynchpin of the now globally-adopted Agenda 2030 is sustainability everything disguised as smart growth/green growth. Everything we do in the civilized world has been declared unsustainable by the global elites who control this climate change industry scam worth trillions of dollars.

To please elitist billionaires and environmentalists around the world, we must fundamentally change according to their plans of de-developing society and regressing to a more primitive lifestyle. They are now regulators of water use, electricity production and use, fossil fuel exploration and use, mining, agriculture, education, medical care, and land use, which will enable them to control the weather and the climate by taxing us into oblivion.

U.N. declared 2013 the International Year of Water Cooperation. They celebrated The World Water Day on March 22, 2014 and the world toilet day on November 19 to remind us that 2.5 billion people have no sanitation and 780 million people do not have access to clean water. http://www.unwater.org/water-cooperation-2013/en/

U.N. alleges that our civilization and standard of living pollute river basins and eating meat and dairy places undue stress on water because those industries use more water to operate.

Some African countries cannot provide clean water to their population yet they are discouraged to produce electricity with “dirty” fossil fuels. Without fossil fuels and electricity, clean water cannot be supplied in sufficient quantities thus water-borne diseases are rampant.

Desalination is frowned upon by environmentalists because it is much more expensive to produce than conventional ways of providing fresh water. Israel that is successfully and relatively inexpensively providing 40% of its water supply from desalination.

According to discovery.com, there are over 15,000 desalination plants around the world that convert ocean water into drinking water either by distillation or reverse osmosis. Environmentalists complain that both processes use too much electricity. Distillation involves boiling the sea water, capturing the steam, separating it into cooling tanks, which then condense the steam into fresh water. Reverse osmosis is filtration that removes the salt and minerals from the water. The brine left behind is usually piped back into the ocean.

Mike Mickley wrote in “US Municipal Desalination Plants: Number, Types, Location, Sizes, and Concentrate Management Practices” that 324 plants were built since 1971 in the United States, capable of producing 25,000 gallons of fresh water per day. The Carlsbad desalination plant in San Diego, California is slated for completion in 2016 and will be capable of producing 50 million gallons of fresh water per day, providing 7 percent of the San Diego region’s supply needs.

United Nations bemoans the fact that “85% of the world’s population lives in the driest half of the planet.” The eventual U.N. planned solution will be social engineering in the form of massive population movement from these arid areas to places like Europe and the United States where the rural density per capita is quite low.

IPCC “predicts with high confidence that water stress will increase in central and southern Europe and, that by the 2070s, the number of people affected will rise from 28 million to 44 million. Summer flows are likely to drop by up to 80 % in southern Europe and some part of central and Eastern Europe. Europe’s hydropower potential is expected to drop by an average of 6%, but rise by 20-50% around the Mediterranean by 2070.” (Alcamo et al., 2007)

Data from the World Bank was cited in 2010 which estimated the cost of a yet to be seen 2 degree Celsius rise in global temperatures to be $70-100 billion per year between 2020 and 2050. Of this cost, anywhere from $13.7-19.2 billion will be water-related. http://www.unwater.org/water-cooperation-2013/water-cooperation/facts-and-figures/en/

Elitists say that, if global population would be allowed to reach the current lifestyle of the average European or North American, 3.5 planets Earth would be needed for sustainability.  That is why population control by any means is considered important. Projections predict 2-3 billion people over the next 40 years. This growth will certainly not come from the senescent white Europeans and North Americans but from third world countries.

As Tom DeWeese wrote in his report, “Sustainablists work to keep these nations from developing or increasing energy use, thereby keeping them poor. Green regulations stop the building of infrastructure. They panic at the idea of increased energy use in developing nations. Instead of working to solve the real problems – the root of poverty - they exploit the excuse of over population and advocate enforcing polices to drastically reduce populations. China’s brutal one child policy of forced abortions and sterilization has become their model.”

How many people does the United Nations believe should inhabit our planet? “A reasonable estimate for an industrialized world society at the present North American material standard of living would be 1 billion. At a more frugal European standard of living, 2 to 3 billion would be possible.” United Nations Global Biodiversity Assessment. https://deweesereport.com/2016/05/17/six-issues-that-are-agenda-21/?mc_cid=040d1ca29b&mc_eid=371fc3eeb1

The fact that we have periods of drought and rainy seasons escapes the “sustainablists” narrative. But, we must still use our water resources responsibly. Do we need to have daddy government control water consumption and recreation via smart water meters and other regulations?

Even though we’ve had 21 consecutive days of non-stop rain, our water bill contained a glossy which stated the necessity to control irrigation via a recommended irrigation schedule. Odd number addresses could water on Sundays, Tuesdays, and Fridays. Even number addresses could water on Monday, Thursday, and Saturday. And businesses could water on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. Installing rain sensors and soil moisture detectors to avoid unnecessary irrigation and further reduce stress on the water system was recommended so that our Service Authority could maintain adequate water pressure in our neighborhood.

The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) reported that 170,000 public drinking water systems in the country serve 264 million people, transporting 13 percent of the total water withdrawn from the U.S. surface and subterranean sources to residential and commercial buildings via 1 million miles of water main pipe that are deep in the ground and over 100 years old.” The cost of replacing these pipes is $1 trillion and will be passed on to the consumers. http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/30724-exclusive-dispatch-private-water-industry-says-water-bills-have-to-go-up

A USA Today survey of 100 municipalities found that “residential water bills in at least one in four places have doubled in the past 12 years.” http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2012/09/27/rising-water-rates/1595651/

Some states fine and jail homeowners who collect rainwater. Even a rain puddle is regulated in other places. In California’s San Joaquin Valley, protecting the delta smelt is more important than irrigating crops that feed millions of Americans.

The voters in Oregon tired of their government’s overt attempt to control their water and land and said no to Nestlé. They rallied and defeated Nestlé’s attempt to privatize their water.

“The issue that brought conservatives and progressives together in this way was clear-cut: keeping Nestlé Waters North America from building a water bottling plant and extracting over 118 million gallons annually from a spring in a small, rural community 45 miles east of Portland.”

Americans drink a lot of expensive bottled water, often just filtered tap water, over 10 billion gallons in 2013. With revenue of $12.3 billion in 2013 and Americans spending $18.2 billion on bottled water in 2014, there is a cash cow in that industry which the International Bottled Water Association is gladly representing. http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/36129-our-water-our-future-voters-in-oregon-defeat-nestle-s-attempt-to-privatize-their-water

Progressives and the U.N. are obsessed with water, among many other things, as a way to control what people do. Take for instance a golfing community in Texas that pumps water from the Brazos River running next to the golf course. After estimating the number of gallons of water needed to water their lawn, they paid the county for the water plus an additional amount in case they have underestimated their needs. After years of this business arrangement, the county wants to “renegotiate” the agreement because they feel that the course is not entitled to so much of “God’s water.”

Additionally, the residents cannot build cisterns to catch rainfall because “God’s water” would run on the property, seep into the ground, and run off into the river, thus polluting it.

As I described in my previous article, http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/58534 United Nations has a strong vested interest to control our water supply and our passage through the seas, oceans, our shipping, fishing, and mineral and oil exploration on the bottom of the ocean. They are controlling it through Agenda 21, chapters 17 and 18, and through the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST) which has not yet been ratified by the Senate for lack of sufficient votes – for now.

Executive Order 13603 from March 16, 2012 gives the Department of Defense authority over all water resources. The order also covers all food, transportation, energy, construction materials, “health resources,” farm equipment, fertilizers, and all fuels that can be commandeered and controlled by our government both in peacetime and during national emergencies. http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/03/16/executive-order-national-defense-resources-preparedness

Tombstone, Arizona, “the town too tough to die,” has been embroiled in expensive litigation with the USDA and the Forest Service over its ability to use water from the mountain springs that has provided the desert town with water since the 1880s, predating the Wilderness Act by 80 years.

A Monument Fire in 2011 destroyed the pipes in Huachuca Mountains that carried the water down from its source in the Miller Canyon Wilderness Area. Boulders the size of cars buried the pipes. The Forest Service denied residents the use of heavy machinery to unearth the pipes that were covered in some places by 12 feet of mud. Instead, they could only use wheelbarrows and hand tools because they were protecting an endangered species, a pair of nesting Mexican spotted owls. http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2012/06/12/is-this-owl-forcing-historic-tombstone-az-to-fix-water-lines-with-horses-and-handtools/

The 10^th Amendment protects states and their subdivisions from federal regulations that impede their ability to fulfill essential health and safety functions. “Though the water may originate on National Forest lands, Bureau of Land Management lands, and other federally managed lands, the rights to that water belong to the farms and ranches and cities.” The lawyers for the federal government disagree.

In mid-June 2012, a group of citizens armed with shovels trekked 2 miles up the mountain in 100 degree heat to restore water by hand from the Gardner Spring to the historical Tombstone, Arizona. http://netrightdaily.com/2012/06/tombstone-az-residents-forced-to-use-shovels-and-hand-tools-to-fix-water-supply/

Mr. Gosar said in his one minute speech to the House of Representatives on December 12, 2012, “Our communities shouldn’t need their Congressman or a lawsuit to make basic repairs to infrastructure. The Federal Government should work with us, not against us, to preserve western water supplies.” http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?r112:H12DE2-0026:/

Progressives don’t like hydroelectric power generation because it is interfering with nature, aquatic habitats, and the natural flow of rivers. Many dams have been blown up for this very reason. The fact that nature itself causes rivers to flood, creating and destroying habitats at the same time, had been ignored by the progressive agenda.

We now have to suffer the ill-effects of low flush “enviro-friendly” toilets that don’t really save any water since people have to flush them 4-5 times in order to get rid of human waste. To make matters worse, city sewers get stopped up because of low-flush toilets, costing them millions and millions of dollars a year to fix huge clogs. The much touted flushable wipes also choke the small residential pipes and cost homeowners millions of dollars a year to dig them out and replace. Yet there is sufficient water, save for cyclical periods of drought.

Copyright: Ileana Johnson 2016

 

 

"Welcome to Sustainable City"

As I walked through Washington, D.C. Ronald Reagan National Airport Terminal C on my way to the gate, a large electronic billboard caught my attention. It was so large that my cell camera could not capture the entire surface. It was a touch screen with the Siemens Corporation logo, announcing, “Welcome to Sustainable City.” (http://www.usa.siemens.com/sustainable-cities/)

Capturing the site on my iphone, the typical fare of environmentalism popped up, presenting Siemens as the leader in “sustainable development,” “green buildings,” “intelligent buildings,” “smart grid,” “sustainable urban development,” “sustainable communities,” “environmental care,” and health care.

As our environment and neighborhoods get “smart,” “sustainable,” and “green” around us, we seem to become less intelligent, more gullible, and willing to accept euphemistic schemes of power and control over our lives.

Familiar with the UN Agenda 21 propaganda and its buzzwords preceded either by “sustainable” or “green” everything, in the name of saving the planet from human behavior, a clever and devious attempt to control every facet of human activity and life, I stopped immediately.

Three touch screen icons inside the billboard displayed games:

-          Green Building Challenge

      -          Urban Mobility Challenge
      -          eCar Charging Challenge

The latest attempt to indoctrinate and propagandize “Green Growth” and demonize urban sprawl as well as fossil-fuels, stated, “Like most cities around the world, it’s growing at an incredible rate: But there are already ways it’s becoming more lasting, livable, and prosperous. See if you can make the city more sustainable.”

My first thought was, of course, that few of the buildings we have built in modern times are that lasting. Europeans can name thousands of beautiful structures that are hundreds of years old. Italians have a couple of Coliseums from the Roman Empire that have survived many earthquakes and are still standing in Rome and Verona. They may not look perfect since thieves who had built their marble palaces and churches had dismantled large chunks over centuries, but they had endured without clever schemes or protection from the “sustainable” crowd.

The game, Urban Mobility Challenge, invited the player to put as many people as possible in public transportation (trains). If the player failed in a timed period, the streets filled to capacity with cars and he/she lost the game. Disgusted with the overt and not so subtle propaganda, I stopped playing the other two games.

A sinking feeling of dread overcame me when I realized the pervasiveness of UN Agenda 21 indoctrination at every level of society without Americans taking much notice. People were passing by the billboard as if it was another advertisement.  To them, it was just a nice way to save the planet from the “irrational” behavior of humans who are going to destroy Mother Earth with their daily living if not told by “progressives” what to do in order to rectify it.

By now, every facet of human life and activity has a “sustainability” or “smart growth” plan. It must make Maurice Strong and his environmental/”progressive” fellow travelers from third world nations very happy. In the past fifty years, they have been feverishly and doggedly, devising, planning, and implementing thousands of ways to capture the wealth of first nations and re-distribute it through clever schemes, initiatives, and “programmes” to third world countries. In spite of writings by “Agenders” like me, domestic and international “progressives” have been very successful, nearing the completion of their “smart growth” dream of total control of our lives and resources, thanks to Americans who are asleep and blissfully uninformed.

I see more and more evidence of UN Agenda 21 irreversible success. The United Nations is not the bumbling idiotic organization that Americans believe it to be. Nobody can escape now being “green” and “sustainable.” It is the progressives’ religion, “green” is the new Marxism.

How did we possibly survive for thousands of years in the absence of “sustainability” agendas, plans, initiatives, and bureaucracies, without progressives telling us what to do? Apparently, we are doomed unless we do what the wise UN says.

Here it was, United Nations pushing mass transit, the abandonment of conventional cars, the forced acceptance of electric cars that catch on fire and nobody wants to buy, in a clever electronic touch screen game intended to appeal to the young generation of Americans who are easily brainwashed into compliance, done with the generous advertising dollars of Siemens, a German corporation.

While on the plane, I was flipping through the glossy passenger magazine. The CEO was talking about “creating a sustainable future” with Eco-Skies, their commitment to “reduce the impact on the environment in the air.”

In November 2011, “United operated the first commercial flight in the U.S. powered by biofuel.” While the effort is laudable, the CEO admits that “biofuels need to be both scalable and salable (producible in large quantities at a price comparable to traditional hydrocarbons) to be successful commercially.” “I’m proud of our initial steps to help improve the capabilities of this environmentally friendly fuel source.”

I wondered about the reduced food supply and the high price of corn that people around the world had to pay because of shortages created by the use of corn as biofuel.

The government is imposing values held dear by “progressives” onto the majority of Americans such as diet, living quarters, exercise, sex, transportation, Mother Earth religion, property rights, health care, abortion, land use, and redefinition of marriage. It is our objections, our resistance, and our non-compliance with their dictates that outrages “progressives.”

“Do what we want, there will be no fuss, and we will not try to squash you.” “Progressives” are the true aggressors in the culture wars and they seem to be winning. At some point, measures that are more forceful will be used to override our objections and the will of the people. The gentle persuasion of now will disappear.

Executive orders and regulations by non-government organizations will be replaced by re-interpretations of the law without due process, rule making, orders, and decrees of public-private partnerships with no opportunity for redress.