Modeshift

In Benzonia, Michigan election day 2012 meant 25 minutes to register, fill out the ballot, and have your vote counted. After months of a campaign that confirmed how divided we are, the act of joining with a community to vote for president is the single most inspiring feature of this wearying election season. Photo/Keith Schneider

It takes a transcendant candidate — a Bill Clinton, a Ronald Reagan — to beat an incumbent president. Mitt Romney, who’s repudiated his signal achievements as a governor and shifted views as often as the game plan strategy required, certainly is not that. So I anticipate that Barack Obama will win a second term today, an honor that he has earned and deserves.

Still, we are a dangerously immature country. How does a president govern a nation that is so well set up to argue? The answer: he really can’t.

It takes a near-revolution to do anything of substance. Passing a national health care program birthed a radical right wing of the G.O.P. that made compromise and consensus dirty words. Changing the influence of unions and collective bargaining rights in state government generated weeks of protest and an unsuccessful gubernatorial recall in Wisconsin. Try to finance a high-speed rail network in the Midwest to speed travel and develop new corridors of commerce and two conservative governors refuse to take the money. Develop technology to produce record levels of natural gas, a much cleaner fuel than oil or coal, and reduce U.S. climate changing emissions to the lowest levels in a generation, and the major environmental organizations attack the breakthrough as too dangerous to pursue.

Our new national DNA is “do nothing anywhere.” We are so unwilling to take risks. We are so afraid of seeing hard choices and big threats as the ready bricks to build new towers of opportunity. So we fight and make stopping stuff from happening instead of finding ways to solve differences to make the country better.

Yesterday in Traverse City I talked about this with Jeff Smith, a friend for years and the accomplished editor of Traverse Magazine. I suggested we needed a party of radical pragmatists that could clear political space for people to learn from each other, develop trust, and actually implement hard decisions that matter. For instance, there’s a big stretch of scientific, resource, and economic ground between the coal industry that wants to remove mountaintops in Appalachia and the green community that wants to stop hydro-fracking to develop natural gas. When it comes to the proven risks to air, water, land, and health, a few deep shale wells in Ohio look to me like a much safer option than a mountaintop removal in West Virginia.   “I know,” he said. “We need a place for people in the middle to get mad about how the ideologues on both sides control the debate.”

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The New York Times today published my article on Owensboro’s downtown development plan, much of it financed by a local tax increase enacted in 2009. Though the public spending has spurred new development and thousands of jobs in the last two years — Owensboro has generated 2,400 jobs in 2010 and 2011, more than any other Kentucky metro area — just two of the seven elected leaders who voted for it are still in office.

Nearly 40 of those new jobs are at Kentucky BioProcessing, a biotech production company (see pix above) in Owensboro. More details on the company are here.

Like other places in the United States, Owensboro is in the distressing grip of the politics of austerity and disinvestment, though that may be weakening. During the reporting for this article Mayor Ron Payne told me he is considering entering the race for a second term. The 65-year-old moderate Republican is credited with leading the work to spur downtown construction projects currently valued at almost $180 million.

The reporting and details of the Times article are based on the six months of research and interviews I did for Citistates, which prepared a lengthy three-part report — What’s Done, What’s Next: A Civic Pact — that suggested a new development strategy for the Ohio River city of 57,000. When I first got to Owensboro in May I was told by a number of people that if Payne ran again he would lose. The sense was that he’d stiff armed the city commission and local leaders into embracing the tax increase against the public will. In other words, Americans want real leaders but when they actually elect a real leader they often can’t wait to get rid of him.

The new assessment of Payne is that he’s likely to win if he runs again. He will announce by the end of January 2012.

I also learned today from Rodney Berry, the president of the Public Life Foundation of Owensboro, that six community meetings are planned to review the Civic Pact study, its 12 recommendations, and “to identify individuals and groups that may be interested in being involved in implementation.” The foundation contracted with Citistates to conduct the study.

– Keith Schneider

The privilege to spend six months studying an American community is rare in journalism. Nevertheless that was the assignment from Citistates last spring. Immerse yourself in Owensboro, Kentucky and emerge with a clear sense of where the community is, and where it might consider going in the 21st century.

Last week, in a series of public events, Citistates described the findings in What’s Done, What’s Next: A Civic Pact. The project found a number of big impediments to Owensboro’s progress — particularly its recent tilt to Tea Party austerity. But that, and several more negative trends — poverty, obesity, rising rates of meth addiction, diminishing median incomes, to name a few –  are a reality check for a city and county that view themselves as distanced from the mainstream, but really aren’t.

Owensboro and Daviess County’s most recent narratives, in fact, are an exception. Local governments are actually leading – understanding the globally competitive context, visualizing the local response, then deciding and managing specific actions.

Working collaboratively with each other, as well as with schools, colleges, business organizations, and non-profits, the city and county have gathered the raw materials of a mission-oriented community environment that allows entrepreneurs and their staffs to flourish. The result, already emerging, has led to more home-grown businesses where effective executives are rewarded with opportunities to move up in the organization instead of out to a different job in another place.

Great communities are distinguished by their ability to instill such value-based incentives, which reward hard work and provide favorable conditions for people to succeed. The United States in the first years of the century has temporarily lost that ability. Owensboro offers invaluable lessons about how to recover that skill. It is steadily empowering its young people and its business owners to be adept in an unpredictable era of transformation.

Owensboro, it turns out, is an example of hope for a sore and confused nation. It is trying something new in order to spark something different. Here are recommendations, several of which were also made in previous Owensboro planning documents, to blow more oxygen into the fire of change that Owensboro has started.

Citistates made some recommendations — see below — that together form a new narrative for this small city and rural county. Chapter Three of A Civic Pact, which includes a more comprehensive discussion on each recommendation, is here.

Thank you to Rodney Berry, Kathy Stroble and Shelly Nichols for all the help in setting up interviews and providing guidance. And thank you to the Hager family and the board of the Public Life Foundation of Owensboro for making the project possible. Thanks also to my Citistates colleagues Curtis Johnson and Neal Peirce, who edited the manuscript and provided expert feedback.

These suggestions are not all-inclusive. They don’t, for instance, deal with the medically uninsured, or alterations in Medicare and Medicaid that are likely in the next generation, and will affect Owensboro’s growing population of seniors, and the region’s less economically fortunate.

These recommendations, rather, focus on what Owensboro’s residents and leaders can achieve over the next generation in what Mayor Ron Payne calls “this little city on the move.”

1. Undertake a New Community Strategic Plan – A new strategic planning initiative is needed to propel the city and county to the next stage of its progress as a center of opportunity.

2. Cultivate and Recruit Women to Serve as Elected and Appointed Leaders – Almost 52 percent of Daviess County’s adults are women and that percentage is not reflected in elected positions in the city or county governments.

3. Strengthen Internal and External Marketing and Communications - More focused outreach is vital to show citizens why a publicly-funded program of education, downtown development, and innovation makes sense in strengthening the economy over the next generation.

4.  Establish a Joint City-County Office of the Ombudsman — Thin out the cross-cutting permitting process while also providing the fairness and access that citizens expect.

5. Establish and Fund the Owensboro Promise – Provide every graduate of the six Owensboro, Daviess County, and Catholic high schools scholarships for tuition and fees to attend a two- or four-year college in or outside Kentucky.

6. Establish the Owensboro Top 20 Young Achievers Program – Provide the most talented young adults the chance to be part of Owensboro’s future and to stay connected in an elite mission-oriented group.

7. Foster Local Foods and Develop More Recreational Infrastructure – Healthier cities note their success as a marketing advantage in promotional campaigns.

8. Generate More Diversity in Civic Life and Improve Business – Recruit investment and development capital from Asia, and especially from China.

9. Promote New and Cleaner Energy Sources - Owensboro’s city-owned utility should serve as an innovator in carbon reduction technology, conservation, efficiency, solar development and other cutting edge thinking about energy production and consumption.

10. Strengthen Transportation Hubs, Build a Streetcar Line – Owensboro’s opportunities over the next two decades are significant in air, ground, and river transportation.

11. Put a Brake On Sprawl - Replace the love affair with big surface parking lots with a marriage to homes and businesses, recreation, and education infrastructure that is reachable on foot, on a bike, public transit, or a very short car ride.

12. Promote Events and Bluegrass Music – Design and develop a new music center that houses the International Bluegrass Music Museum.

– Keith Schneider

CENTRAL LAKE, MI – There is no sprawl in Central Lake, a northern village of 942 residents in magnificent  Antrim County. At this time of year rows of feed corn await harvest and the green white pine and multi-colored hardwood forests pour down the hillsides to the deep blue waters of the lake that gives the village its name. (see pix above and below)

Central Lakes possesses an asset all-too rare in American communities – a clear center. But there are a number of empty storefronts, and a closed pizza restaurant and bar, that signal the economic emergency that has engulfed this region and much of the rest of Michigan has gotten no easier and actually looks to be getting worse. There is  no scenario of aspiration evolving in the governing sector. The dark windows reflect a persistent inability to reckon with the era of stalemate and stagnation that is scarring this state and the rest of the United States.

One seemingly insurmountable problem here, as in so many other places, is that residents and the people they elect to state and national office are consistently unable and unwilling to make a fateful choice. That is the decision between the grim consequences of austerity, and the commanding logic of investment, entrepreneurism, and imagination. People are confused about the appropriate role of the public sector in encouraging private sector development. They hear from one party that government is the problem. They hear next to nothing from the other.

And because people don’t know they also can’t fathom the complexities of winning the fierce contests in two arenas that require highly developed levels of definition and understanding.

The first contest is external. Technology, foreign competition, and terrorism have unnerved Americans. The nation’s customary feeling of command and control has been disrupted. Taking its place is a state of reaction that whipsaws between fear and thoughtless decisions that are eroding the country’s self-confidence. The nation’s two century-old democracy suddenly seems immature, and its leadership both ineffective and reckless.

The second confrontation is internal. How does a community like Central Lake reach agreement on a development and business retention strategy when all people want to do is rant about ideology. And while the clashes escalate the town arrives at the same economic dead end of argument and grievance that has damaged so many other places in the United States. Paraphrasing New York Times journalist Tom Friedman, Central Lake is not just facing a few tough years. It may be contendingwith a bad century.

To be fair, it’s understandable that Central Lake citizens and a good number of its elected officials exercise caution and seemed so ready to hug tightly to the old patterns and economic ideals of the 20^th century. For a long time those tools worked. The prevailing market conditions shaped a national purpose, a big target of where to aim, and a clear picture of what economic success looked like.

That picture, which came to be known as the American Dream, was first introduced at the 1939 New York World’s Fair in the General Motors-sponsored Futurama exhibit. Futurama was a huge diorama of a highway-heavy, congestion-free, car-dependent, time-efficient, leafy green all-American suburban pattern of development that no one had ever seen before.

A Pattern of Civilization Fit For One Century That No Longer Works
The exhibit was a smash. Visitors were transported in egg-shaped seats on a soaring conveyor belt across a landscape of innovation, creativity, and optimism. What astute observers recognized was that GM’s new American geography needed enormous public investments in the roads, sewers, education, research, planning, and industrial infrastructure to make it reality.

The shining and mobile American way of life displayed by GM, moreover, was eminently achievable. It fit the essential market opportunities of its time – cheap energy, low cost land, moderately rising population, competitiveness in core industries, rising family incomes, growing government wealth, and the willingness of taxpayers to invest in the nation’s future.

Over the next two decades voters elected to Congress and the White House lawmakers of both parties who cooperated in steadily enacting big and expensive bills – the GI bill to educate veterans, lending bills to put them in new homes, the 1956 Highway Act to start the Interstate system, water and sewer spending bills, research grants for engineering – that changed the way America looked and functioned.

The problem Central Lake and the rest of the country confronts is that the American way of life no longer fits the times. All of the underlying market trends that produced the drive-through economy have flipped. Energy prices are high and steadily rising. Land is expensive. Entire core industries, and millions of jobs, have moved beyond our borders. Median incomes, in real dollars adjusted for inflation, have fallen 10 percent since the late 1990s. Governments operate with enormous deficits. Taxpayers are unwilling to invest in a collaborative future.

The result is a town and a nation with fewer choices and less mobility, a nation that is uncharacteristically hesitant and afraid. And while ideologues on all sides shout past each other, and make holding office a thankless and grueling experience, the real danger in our governing circles is the entrenchment of the politics of stasis. Doing nothing. Holding the line. Not deciding. Not acting.

On a beautiful fall day, warm and clear and colorful, that outcome seems so sad.

– Keith Schneider

MANILA — The sun rose here to another towering and impressive Asian skyline. On the 10th anniversary of 9/11, while the world joins the United States in honoring a terrifying moment, I see skylines here and in China that describe in clear line and form just how far that day blasted us off course.

One measure is the scant alterations in the skylines of big American cities in the last decade. Another is that in Washington and most state capitals the stupid party has no clue how to stop the evil party from damaging the economy and America’s capacity to reckon with big problems. We’ve become a nation of ‘no’ — no progress, no money, no change, no chance.

Meanwhile, the growing nations of Asia are all about ‘yes.’ In Shanghai, new subway lines measuring 35 kilometers and more, take four years to construct. It takes that long to consider permits for big projects in the U.S.

Yesterday I boarded a maglev train from downtown Shanghai to Pudong Airport, a $6.50 ride at 431 kilometers per hour (267 mph) that took less than 10 minutes. A cab takes 50 minutes and costs $30.

In the U.S., the evil party views trains the same way they view gay marriage, as an ideological affront. Two of our conservative governors in the Midwest earlier this year returned to the federal government hundreds of millions of dollars to improve the regional passenger rail network.

Manila is no Shanghai, now very clearly competing with Tokyo and Hong Kong for the honor of being viewed as the capital of Asia. For that matter, Shanghai at this point is competing with New York to claim distinction as capital of the world.

Manila has its own aspirations. Demographers report that 20 million people now live in the largest metropolitan region in the Philippines. That’s more people than live in all but two American states — California and Texas. Traffic is intense 24/7. A lot of the office towers seen from my room on the 26th floor of the Malayan Plaza hotel look new. The air today is cleaner than what I breathe in Beijing and Shanghai. Donald Trump, the newspaper reported this morning, just reached agreement with a big Manila developer to put his name on a new mixed-use luxury tower.

Still, third world menaces exist here. They are reflected in the “security advisory” that greets guests on the desks of their rooms in the Malayan Plaza, which is located in a well-traveled commercial district. The advisory warns of “friendly strangers” who “can lure you into their vehicles and then offer drinks spiked with gammahydroxybutate, which induces immediate sleep and subsequent memory loss.” It advises “never walk alone at night if you can avoid it,” and to be wary of taxi drivers “who want to charge a flat rate.” Avoid wearing heavy jewelry, eat in reputable restaurants to “minimize risk in safety, security, health and sanitation,” and be ever wary of who has use of your credit card because syndicates working with retail and restaurant staff can copy the details. “The information is then transferred on to forged cards which are sold or exported.”

There’s more. Use the door latch and check all visitors to the room. And watch out for “various con artists and tricksters” seeking “loans” that quite obviously won’t be repaid.

It’s a useful recounting of safety suggestions, a kind of informal Manila street-level operating system designed for new arrivals.

I wonder if we can’t write something similar for dealing with the con artists and tricksters who’ve driven America to post 9/11 stagnation and frustration. Advisory number one: Get real, people! Gay marriage. Abortion. Guns. Lower taxes. Deficit reduction. Hate radio. That’s like cleaning up a sewage spill with a soup spoon.

– Keith Schneider

Arguably the central provision of President Obama’s State of the Union address last night was the proposal to generate 80 percent of the nation’s electricity from clean energy sources by 2035 — including nuclear energy and CCS coal technology. Getting there will take a miracle, the same sort of pie in the sky thinking that allowed our president to also present the daft notion of  giving 80 percent of Americans access to high speed rail by 2035. This in a country that last built a great rail station over a century ago.

Both ideas, of course, fit neatly into the necessary big box of ideas that can generate the innovation, imagination, inspiration, and transition-era job growth that rebuilds the American economy, and especially the “be all you can be” contract with its people.

But neither is likely to happen. To achieve either goal will take a sharp shift in the political geography on the right and the left, as well as much larger public investments in innovation and financing than the country has been willing to make to date. In an era of fierce and fast-paced transition prompted by the new markets of the 21st century, Americans have expressed time and again their resistance to doing anything more than staying firmly in place. I’ve begun to call our predicament the “amber alert” because we’re so determined to wrap our personal gains and communities in amber.

Republican governors in the Midwest, for instance, want to give back the federal high speed rail construction money made available last year, and are governing against the clean energy investments that have helped turn solar, wind components, and lithium-ion battery manufacturing into the fastest growing new industrial sectors in Ohio and Michigan.

Let’s quickly evaluate the 80 percent electrical generation goal. To achieve 80 percent clean energy generation essentially means replacing at least 500 gigawatts of conventional coal-fired generation with cleaner alternatives. In essence, the U.S. would have to nearly completely rebuild its electrical generating infrastructure, which last year had about 940 gigawatts of electricial generating capacity. By 2035, according to DOE projections, electrical generating demand in the U.S. could grow to 1,200 gigawatts. Today less than a quarter of electrical generating capacity is supplied by nuclear power, hydro, wind, and geothermal in the U.S or roughly 225 gigs.

To date the nation has indicated no proclivity to launch a crash program for clean energy investment. The $100 billion provided in the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, now threatened by the Republican House majority, is merely a down payment. In fact, the largest energy investment in the nation is being made to drill, mine, process, and transport the unconventional oil and gas reserves being tapped in the middle part of the country.

Moreover, while the right discounts the science of climate change and expresses skepticism about the costs of clean energy subsidies, the grassroots left is digging in to fight clean energy projects of scale. Opposition campaigns are occurring in at least 35 states and focus on every available alternative — wind, solar, geothermal, biomass, and nuclear. Here in Benzie and Manistee counties where I live in northern Michigan, a $330 million proposal by Duke Energy to build 112 wind turbines is the focus of a fear-based opposition campaign that includes scientifically unfounded assertions that the turbine blades generate dangerous sound waves that can cause farm animals to spontaneously abort.

The country that is responding to the new energy market opportunities of the 21st century is China, which commands nearly all of those very same markets. I just returned from a long reporting trip to China for Circle of Blue, the first-rate independent news organization that covers the freshwater crisis. (See pix above of Ordos, Inner Mongolia) I serve there as senior editor. I visited the largest clean energy industrial park in the world in Gansu Province, as well as some of the largest steel plants, solar farms, and coal mines.

China has set a goal to drive their clean energy diversification program for electrical production — wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, IGGC — from 200 gigawatts currently to over 630 gigs by 2020. The breakdown by 2020 looks like this: wind (150 gigs), solar (20 gigs), nuclear (60 gigs), hydro (400 gigs).

Still, because of China’s rapidly growing demand for energy — total energy consumption has tripled since 1995, reaching over 100 quadrillion BTUs this year from 35 quads 15 years ago — coal will still be responsible for more than 70 percent of total electrical supply, a little less than it is today.

All that energy supports the world’s largest markets for steel, glass, cement, energy, cars, residential construction, nuclear and coal-fired power plant construction, hydro dam construction, highways, high-speed rail, and a dozen other critical products  of modern society. China’s transportation infrastructure has surpassed the United States, as have its grade school students, now the best in the world.

Americans note that China’s political economy is founded on a system that has no veto power. The country acts on what it decides regardless of public opinion. But you have to wonder whether there are facets of that system that are more fit for the time. China also produced 70 million new jobs in the last decade and the incomes of 400 million people are rising, in contrast to diminishing job numbers and steadily declining incomes in the U.S.

President Obama set out worthy goals last night to light at least a spark of national motivation to fix America. But moving forward on any idea of real significance is so difficult he declined to lay out even the most modest specific steps. You wonder whether a quarter century from now a U.S. president will still be able to say, “And yet, as contentious and frustrating and messy as our democracy can sometimes be, I know there isn’t a person here who would trade places with any other nation on Earth.”

– Keith Schneider

Maybe things aren’t as dismaying as we thought a week ago. Or just a little less in the dismay department.

In the last few days, two of the prominent names in American politics and business appeared to reach consistent conclusions about governing, technology, and the warming climate.

On Friday, Karl Rove told an audience of natural gas developers in Texas that “climate is gone” as a Congressional issue. And this week, in a Rolling Stone interview, Bill Gates said it will take a breath-taking leap in innovation to meet rising global energy demand and still cut climate-changing pollution. “To have the kind of reliable energy we expect and to have it be cheaper and zero carbon,” said the Microsoft chairman, “we need to pursue every available path to achieve a really big breakthrough.”

Rove and Gates view the crisis from alternate sides of the political spectrum, of course. But in succinctly describing the problem they also indirectly set out a path for climate activism that involves much greater grassroots agitation to win elections, and higher levels of publicly-funded support for clean energy research and development.

Tactics
Both facets of that tactical strategy are within reach. In Washington, the results of the election, while damaging, also left enough sympathetic lawmakers in place to make some progress on the clean energy investment front. Democratic lawmakers intent on making a difference on climate and energy retained their chairmanships in the Senate. And of the 56 members of the Congressional Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition, just seven House and one Senate member lost their bids for reelection. “It should be clear,” said Sam Ricketts, the coalition’s executive director, “that a vote for cap and trade and ardent support for a cleaner environment were not the target of voter anger that many opposed to these policies might lead you to believe.”

In addition, the most important and telling vote for climate action in the country was the strong majority result to enforce the emissions reduction and energy efficiency goals of AB32, California’s climate law. In a game changing marriage of superior campaign financing, message development, and grassroots activism, climate advocates and clean energy venture capitalists outspent, out-organized, and soundly beat the oil industry in a crucial vote.

A New Opening
Climate activists in and outside Washington, who nearly a year ago anticipated a big diplomatic advance in Copenhagen, are justifiably worn by the reverse momentum in the 11 months since. But in the past week, my conversations around the U.S. indicate a resolve among activists to dig deeper and be prepared for a new opening.

That could come sooner than any of us think.

No matter how tightly the fossil fuel industry wraps itself around lawmakers in state capitols and on Capitol Hill, there is still the one motivating electoral factor it cannot control – the American response to rising gasoline prices. The global knife edge that describes the tightening supplies and increasing demand for oil will inevitably tip toward $4-a- gallon gas or higher, say energy industry analysts. When that happens, perhaps in the next year, climate activists need to be ready to identify the culprits who blocked the cheaper and cleaner alternatives and the jobs, prosperity, and safety they would have produced.

– Keith Schneider

A long time ago, in the mid-1980s, I wrote about New York City’s infrastructure modernization in Manhattan Inc., an upscale business magazine that no longer exists. It was a perfect gig for a writer who as a kid counted bridge overpasses on the highway during the regular family drive from suburban New York to suburban Boston to visit my grandparents. I loved watching new skyscrapers get slotted into New York City’s skyline. I was fascinated with the bulldozers and road graders at Interstate highway construction sites. In my first weeks as a New York Times reporter I spent an evening with a Port Authority construction crew assigned to upgrade the ventilation system in the Lincoln Tunnel. It was classic boy stuff.

Infrastructure, in short, is the collection of basic civic equipment – roads and highways, rail lines, reservoirs, dams, water and sewage pipes and treatment plants, transmission lines, broadband, airports, public buildings, parks and plazas  – that civilizations require to function efficiently and provide citizens a reasonable quality of life. Infrastructure is the public investments that nations make to advance their economies and provide for their citizens. Essentially, infrastructure is a measure of a nation’s vision, will to invest, and its capacity to join engineering and design in service of the public interest.

Heads of state and their aides think of infrastructure in terms of budgets and spending. But architects and engineers have a more fun phrase  –  ”tolerances” – that they use to describe their work.  Tolerances are a measurement of precision — the refinements of spacing, line, angle, materials, and craftsmanship that describe the quality of design and construction. Basically tolerances define a nation’s capacity to make the investments -  and for designers, developers, and contractors the capacity to sweat the details to produce projects that last 150 years in instead of 15.

Infrastructure and Tight Tolerances
Let’s just put it this way: China knows tolerances. After spending more than two weeks in Beijing and Tianjin, it’s plainly evident that China’s drive to build its infrastructure and the nation’s rapid rise to the top of the world’s economic heaps is told in its ability to fit the pieces together to achieve state-of-the-art design tolerances.

The most exceptional example that I found on this trip, my first to China, was the Meijiang Convention and Exhibition Center, a 2.5 million-square foot marble, glass, and polished stainless steel showcase of Chinese design and construction technology. There is no comparable exhibition center in the United States, and certainly none that was constructed in eight months, as the Meijiang center was earlier this year before it opened in September. The way the interior steel trusses supported the roof 10 stories above the center floor, the close fit of the fine-grained wood walls, and polished marble floors, and the use of natural light and noise absorbing carpets made the gigantic building seem almost cozy, airy, and exceptionally comfortable. Just as impressive was the great plaza outside, as large as a military parade ground, a perfectly flat expanse of marble paving tiles so precisely fitted together that the lines between the tiles were thousands of feet long and as straight as a gun shot.

The Impossible Plaza That’s Possible
Karl Burkhart, a communications specialist with Tcktcktck, and a trained designer with a masters in architecture, also marveled at the convention center and the plaza. He told me that in the United States, such a building would take two years to plan and design with available computer programs and equipment. The speed with which China executed the Meijiang convention center indicated that Chinese architects used state-of-the-art three dimensional design programs and constructed the building as they developed the design. Moreover, he said, the great marble plaza would not even be attempted in the U.S. because even if it could be done – which he doubted – it would be so expensive that “no American architect in his right mind would even suggest it.”

I’ve spent weeks at a time in every state in the United States except Hawaii, and have now traveled to over 20 nations on four continents, and when it comes to the overall scope and quality of infrastructure, the U.S. remains among the global leaders. Of special note in the U.S. today is the competition among cities to build new light rail lines that join neighborhoods to each other and to downtowns.

But the current scope of infrastructure work in the recession-dragged, politically daffy U.S. pales in comparison to what China is achieving today. The other showcases of design and engineering tolerance are China’s high-speed rail lines, and the fabulous modern train stations that launch and catch the bullet trains. The distance from Beijing to Tianjin is crossed by a snow white train with blue accents that streaks at 205 miles per hour on an elevated track. Outside, the flat landscape flies by. Inside there is no quiver, no shake, no tremble, and no noise except the muffled sound of rushing air. The non-stop 90-mile trip takes 30 minutes.

In Tianjin the train launches from a crowded and spotless station that is lit naturally with sunlight pouring through a grand glass roof. In Beijing, the train arrives in an even newer station where the platforms are paved in mirror-shine marble and the waiting room, distinguished by towering blue, green, and red LED arrival and departure boards, has even more natural light from windows that line the roof. China has built 4,000 miles of high-speed rail and has 6,000 more under construction or planned.

An Era Passed For U.S.
It’s not that the United States hasn’t constructed some of the world’s iconic infrastructure. The Hoover Dam, more than 700 feet tall and built to generate power by holding back the mighty Colorado, was the highest dam in the world when it opened in 1936. The Empire State Building was, for decades, the tallest building in the world. The Golden Gate bridge spans the Pacific entrance to San Francisco Bay. The 40,000-plus mile Interstate highway network is a global envy. The great metropolitan skylines of New York, Boston, Chicago, Denver, and Los Angeles are recognizable around the world.

It’s just that the exuberance of China’s construction program, and its accompanying attention to detail and tight engineering tolerances, are emblems of a country that’s so clearly saying “It’s our time!” Meanwhile in the United States, we seem an old and tired nation, unwilling to marshal the unity of purpose that it takes to build a high-speed rail network, or great solar and wind farms, or new smart transmission grids or even the great soaring buildings that once distinguished our nation.

New construction has come to a near halt as a result of the Great Recession. And where our architects thrive, and where we’re putting our cultural resources is in new stadiums like the one in Dallas that has one of the world’s biggest TV screens, or New York where the Giants and Jets play in one sky-box extravaganza and the Yankees play in another. We’re playing games while China plays us.

China is certainly awake in the 21^st century. The corridor between Beijing and the flat lands south of Tianjn is one immense construction zone. Every quarter mile, on both side of the rail line and highway, towers rise in clumps. Not one at a time, but in groups of 10 or 15. The International Energy Agency reported today that China has overtaken the United States as the world’s largest consumer of energy.  It’s another of China’s world firsts, which also include being the largest producer of climate-changing emissions, the largest car market in the world, the largest solar and wind markets, and the fastest growing industrial economy.

Within a decade China could also surpass the United States as the largest economy. It looks inevitable. The American century ended on 9/11. The soaring Chinese century, and its tight tolerances, is very clearly past the lift-off phase.

– Keith Schneider

TIANJIN, China – Whatever the differences that irked delegates from China and the United States during the six days of climate negotiations that ended here on Saturday, divisions principally defined by how each would control carbon emissions and measure progress, the unmistakable conclusion reached by most of the delegates and participants is how closely tied the two nations are to each the other.

Lying quietly below the nuanced diplomatic language of frustration and distrust expressed all week by Chinese and American negotiators is an expanse of cooperative projects in and outside government that are expressly designed to help China and the U.S. use energy more efficiently, develop new technology, and lower carbon emissions.

Participants this week toured an advanced coal-fired power plant that is being built by a consortium of Chinese companies and includes an American coal company. Chinese and American partnerships also are being forged in solar and wind manufacturing, and in carbon capture and sequestration emissions control technology. The two countries last year established a joint clean energy research center, with offices in China and the United States.

Coda Electric Car
Another good example is how Coda Automotive, a California-based electric vehicle manufacturer, and Lishen Battery Company, a Tianjin-based manufacturer, are collaborating to build batteries in their joint venture factory for Coda’s all-electric cars for sale in the U.S. starting early next year. The powerful, 800-pound lithium-ion battery pack that will provide the Coda with a 100-mile range between charges, is being built and assembled in Lishen’s joint venture plant on the city’s south side.

The Coda’s drive train and electric engine are American designs built in factories in the U.S. The car’s safety systems were engineered by American and European experts and will be built by American companies. And a Chinese auto manufacturer will receive all of the various parts and assemble them under contract into new cars for shipment to the U.S. The company is planning to build a battery assembly plant in Ohio, where Coda’s chief executive, Kevin Czinger, was raised.

In his blog posts and various interviews in recent months Czinger has expressed his own frustration with energy and climate policy in the U.S. But that is not affecting his company, which he says will sell 14,000 cars in California next year. “The good news is that we can take action,” Czinger writes in his latest blog post. “We don’t need to wait for our leaders.  We can do what we do best –  take new ideas and new technology and create.  The electric car can be the driver of a new economic and energy system.  It can be the driver of a new American mindset and a revived manufacturing foundation.  Within a globally interdependent world that will have increasingly higher shipping costs, we can rebuild our car industry based on a new technology.  And we can replace our foreign oil with clean, secure and affordable electricity generated in America.  We can create a new prosperity for this century.  We have the choice. Now.”

The Coda (see pix right) will be priced at around $45,000, and with federal and state electric vehicle and clean energy incentives, the off-the-lot cost will be closer to the low $30,000′s. Either way, neither the Coda, nor the other all-electric passenger cars making their way to the market – the Nissan Leaf and the Ford Focus – are priced low enough for sale in the world’s largest car market here in China.

Biggest Car Market and Big Oil Demand
Last year, China surpassed the U.S. as the world’s number one vehicle market, recording 13.5 million car and truck sales, according to the China Passenger Car Association. Manufacturers, by contrast, sold 10.43 million in the U.S., according to the Center for Automotive Research at the University of Michigan. This year vehicle sales in the U.S. could reach 11.6 million according to J.D. Power.

Sales in China in 2010 are expected to top 16 million units. Xu Changming, a research director at the State Information Center, told reporters in June that the number of vehicles in China could reach 78 million units, up from 63 million at the end of 2009, and surpassing Japan as the second largest nation for vehicle registrations. He also said the number of vehicles in China is expected to eventually rise to about 490 million units, though he did not offer a date for reaching that forecast.

A Coda executive on Saturday said that at the current sales pace China’s vehicle population could reach 200 million by the end of the decade, or roughly 60 million less than the number of vehicles in the U.S. this year.

Electric vehicles, of course, are a staple of transportation in China, though most of them are two- and three-wheel bikes, scooters, and carts fitted with small electric motors. The country manufactures state-of-the-art electric buses, a number of which were used to quietly transport climate negotiators and participants to and from the conference center and their hotels.

The country also is rapidly electrifying its high-speed rail network capable of transporting tens of thousands of passengers on trains, like the one that links Tianjin to Beijing (see pix below and right), capable of speeds in excess of 200 miles per hour. According to Chinese NGO experts at the climate conference, China has built 4,000 miles of high speed rail and is in the process of constructing 6,000 more miles.

China, though, could use many more electric cars. Gas and diesel-fueled cars jam China’s highways and urban streets, and contribute to the smog in China’s major cities that is so thick (see pix above in Tianjin) it obscures the tops of buildings. The rapid rise in vehicle ownership also is challenging China’s economic security, just as it is in the United States. China’s oil consumption last year reached 8.625 million barrels a day, or 3.1 billion barrels annually, or nearly twice China’s consumption in 1999, according to the respected 2010 BP Statistical Review of World Energy. U.S. oil consumption is now just under 7 billion barrels annually, according to the Department of Energy.

China produces nearly 3.8 million barrels of oil daily from its own oil fields, which means that it imports 56 percent of its petroleum. That percentage will grow steadily higher. The demand for oil in China grew 539,000 barrels a day from 2008 to 2009, or nearly 7 percent. Meanwhile China’s oil production fell 111,000 barrels a day during the same period, or just under 3 percent.

– Keith Schneider

TIANJIN, China — I’m in Tianjin, China today (see pix above) and for the next week to report on the UN Climate Conference, the first ever held in China. I spent much of the day in a Climate Action International meeting with activists from around the planet, though there were many fewer here than attended the UN climate meetings in Barcelona and Copenhagen last year. Everybody is talking about steps forward and preserving the UN negotiating process, a much different message than the big breakthrough that seemed possible in 2009. The American NGO, U.S. Climate Action Network, where I serve as a senior writer, has scheduled a number of events, including a briefing on China’s coal production and consumption, that will be useful.

The world rightfully views China as the leading force in what could turn out to be the Chinese century. Who really knows since its 2010 and early. Still Warren Buffet and Bill Gates were in Beijing last week talking to China’s growing number of billionaires about philanthropy. The Hurun Rich List, the Chinese equivalent of the Forbes 400, counts 400 to 500, more than in the U.S., according to its director. Last week China launched its latest rocket, testing its ability to circumnavigate the moon in preparation for an unmanned moon landing in 2013. I rode the bullet train here last night from Beijing at 330 km/hr or 205 mph. LED manufacturing in China encompasses 3,000 companies and very clearly, if you arrive here at night to see Tianjin’s modern buildings outlined against the dark sky, the city’s developers are enamored with the technology. The Shanghai Expo that got underway on October 1 is based on a theme this year of metropolitan sustainability — clean energy, transit, conservation, parks, and energy efficiency.

If you have the idea that China is on a roll, a few days immersion here just confirms it. On the other hand, it’s not hard to find the burrs in the machine of progress. The sun is still cloaked more times than not in thick air pollution. The country is planning to triple coal production even as it touts progress in clean energy development. Millions of China’s urban residents rid bodily wastes and shower in closet-sized and mold-ridden combined bathroom units that most American campgrounds wouldn’t tolerate. The glaciers of the Himalayas, China’s primary southern water source, are melting faster than the Arctic. And Chinese industry is dangerous and dirty. Last week a mine supervisor in Shanxi Province, in China’s north, received a suspended death sentence for conspiracy, bribery, and other crimes associated with the rupture of an illegal iron ore tailings pond that unleashed a toxic flood and landslide that killed 277 people in 2008.

Let’s just say this week is going to be intensely interesting.

– Keith Schneider