Just when you thought Denver wouldn't get any more expensive. CPR's environmental reporting fails to ask relevant questions ... again.
And just when you thought Denver wouldn't get any more expensive ...
In Nov 2022, Denver voters approved a measure (via Denver ballot initiative) to add a fee to people who own property or live in Denver to pay to fix the sidewalks around town. More context on that initiative is in the first link below.
According to the Gazette story linked second below, Denver’s Department of Transportation and Infrastructure (DOTI) is considering changes to how the fees are calculated.
Rather than charging per linear foot of sidewalk in front of a property, they are proposing to charge homeowners a flat fee and then to charge multifamily properties by the number of residents.
Let's look at numbers. Per the article,
"The new fee structure would hit apartment or condominium owners harder than residential owners, for roughly the same amount of sidewalk. That's because each homeowner will be charged about $150 annually, whereas a multifamily building owner will be charged $27.83 per resident per year. "
and from further down,
"Take, for example, the prominent 1600 Glenarm Place multifamily complex at 16th Street Mall and Glenarm Place. The luxury apartment complex has 333 units, which means a minimum of 333 residents — undoubtedly more. That building covers only 1/4 of a city block and fronts less than 1/2 of the sidewalks on that block. But owners Northland Investment Corp. will end up paying at least $9,267 annually under the new fee structure."
In the building where my wife and I rent her condo, the total fee would be about 14 x 27.83 = $389.62 per year for about the same amount of sidewalk as a house.
My guess is that the new rules are there to pull in more revenue to pay for sidewalks without shocking everyone at the actual cost per foot of concrete walks (right now the national average being about $6 to $12 per square foot making a 3 foot by about 65 ft bit of sidewalk come out to about $1800--likely higher since it will be a government contract actually).
One wonders at the outcome of this initiative if this rule had been articulated by the city PRIOR to the measure passing.
Unfortunately for Denver residents, however, comments against the measure** extant at the time weren't enough to convince a majority to pass on the initiative.
From the Ballotpedia site linked first below, Jeanne Fatz, providing comment against, said:
"Initiative 307 sets a 9-year deadline to build missing sidewalks, repair poorly maintained sidewalks and widen narrow sidewalks in every part of the city. Given that enormous scope, the schedule simply cannot be met with the existing construction shortages in Denver. Delays and cost overruns are inevitable."
Let me repeat: delays and cost overruns are inevitable. And sure enough, we see the costs going up and DOTI asking for more time before we've even started.
**Something you as a resident can, and should, be doing in your own local bluebook!
https://ballotpedia.org/Denver,_Colorado,_Initiated_Ordinance_307,_Create_Sidewalk_Enterprise_and_Enact_Property_Owner_Fee_for_Sidewalk_Repair_and_Maintenance_Measure_(November_2022)
https://denvergazette.com/news/government/denver-sidewalk-repair-ordinance-changes/article_72e4e0b4-cf67-11ee-bd11-c7d30a3d110c.html
https://denvergazette.com/news/government/denver-sidewalk-repair-ordinance-changes/article_72e4e0b4-cf67-11ee-bd11-c7d30a3d110c.html
"Climate change is erasing decades of air quality improvements. It’s also making Colorado’s air worse"
Put that stark language next to the eye-popping map of Colorado (my goodness, look at all those angry colors!) both of them coming from the CPR article linked first below, and worry would not be inappropriate response.
The trouble with reporting about science from people that don't understand it (and seemingly don't have much interest in learning) is that they are prone to be too credulous about what they're told, and they miss important details. In this particular case, what was missed was an understanding of what exactly was measured/modeled, and a healthy skepticism about how method affects applicability.
I understand the temptation. Academic papers are jargon intensive. If they contain mathematics it's even worse because that just adds this whole new level problems. A casual perusal of a paper that's heavy on both can easily lead one to assume that the authors have got to be digging deep into the truth.
Don't confuse jargon and equations with sophistication or truth, however. They are both shorthand. Putting it diplomatically, both are a way for people who speak the same language to communicate efficiently.
What you'll often find, when you have the stubbornness and/or time to sit down and carefully look through papers is that at bottom we're talking about relatively simple ideas. And those foundational ideas, regardless of the math that sits atop them, may or may not be realistic. Since they are foundational, they deserve special scrutiny.
I do not have time to go point by point through every detail here, but I can give a flavor of what I'm talking about by looking at a similar paper done by First Street (the group that did the report CPR cites in their article).
Note: I would have looked at the actual report mentioned in the article but this report was not as heavy on detail as another paper by the same group (this other report is also linked in the article) The method is substantially the same. The report I discuss below is linked third below.
The basic thrust of both the new report and the paper we're going to look at is that climate change (through mechanisms like increasingly intense and frequent wildfires) is going to make ozone and fine-particulate pollution worse in the future and that these climate change-induced increases will erase progress we've made on reducing pollutants via laws like the act that created the EPA.
Not only that, but the authors claim that they are able to forecast not just a general trend, but that they will be able to give local-scale forecasts of pollution. In other words, they won't just say ozone will be worse, they'll say it's going to be worse in Larimer County, CO specifically while Washington County, CO will fare better.
Trying to track fluid diffusion and flow along with weather for anything here on earth, either locally or globally is a nightmare and nearly impossible to do via the mathematics of fluid mechanics differential equations.
As such, if you hope to try, you must resort to numerical approximations. These approaches are a "coarse-grained" approximation of what you would do with calculus. You chop an area up into little bits and you assume that the bits are small enough so that the properties of any one bit are uniform across it. The only interactions you need to follow, then, are those that occur among and between bits.
You assume how the bits interact, you then have the computer step forward in time watching as, say, the ozone propagates itself across your region.
In theory, if you have enough computing power and patience, if you have enough knowledge as to the dynamics of fluid flow and diffusion, you can get as finely grained an answer and go as far into the future as you'd like: feed the computer the starting values for each little chunk and let it go. The computer simulation should produce what is happening with ozone and fine particulate pollution anywhere and any-when.
In theory. But theory is not reality.
Take a look at screenshot 1 from the paper linked third below. You'll see in a picture what I describe above. The researchers "discretized" CA in space (that is, they chopped it up into little grids), and then they asked the computer to keep track of what is happening in each grid across time by looking at how, say, ozone is diffusing and moving from one grid to another. How are these next door neighbors affecting each other? How is the gas propagating?
How do they know what the starting conditions are? See the red dots? Those are where CA currently has ozone/weather stations. Those give a (partial) initial condition the computer model can start from.
Look at the grids again. Now look at the number and distribution of dots. Each dot is a measurement, it's not calculated. Do you suppose the number and distribution of dots depicted here gives a thorough and complete state of ozone and pollution in CA at any given moment? If that starting value is not accurate, is not complete, the value of any modeling built on it is suspect at best.
The other thing I want you to consider is how well this approach reflects reality. Fluid movement is complicated and the earth is big. How well can this approach model the effects of ozone coming East from Asia? How well can the computer keep track of the complex chemistry involved where ozone is not only moving but being created?
The authors themselves even mentioned this problem (see screenshot 2).
I'm not going to tell you here that this study is invalid. I'm not going to tell you that climate change isn't happening or that we won't have problems in the future.
I do want to get you thinking about the validity of research like this and thus the validity of its specific conclusions.
It is okay to question climate science and climate modeling. It is okay to have doubt. It is, in fact, reasonable to do both.
I wish that reporters would make it more of a practice to do so because I think the conversation we're having as a nation right now would be a fuller one and our approaches to it would be better and more centrist.**
**One last thing based here purely on logic. It won't just be climate change that drives wildfires (and thus small particulate matter suspended in the air we breath). It will be our policy with regard to how we manage forests. Yet another thing missing in CPR's article.
https://www.cpr.org/2024/02/26/climate-change-erasing-decades-of-air-quality-improvements-making-colorado-air-worse/
https://firststreet.org/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590162122000491
Related:
Two important things that go to the credibility of the organization that did the report CPR pulls from above.
1. You'll note in the CPR article that the report used is not peer reviewed. Peer review is an important part of science. It's not sufficient on its own, it's not perfect, but it's an important check on what the report's authors might claim. Kudos to CPR for at least acknowledging this, but it goes to credibility and makes the choice of reporting on it dicey. I did email the reporter and the editors at CPR to see what if any policy they have re. reporting non-peer reviewed reports. I haven't heard back but will update if and when I do.
2. I want you to also note that First Street, the organization behind the report, is a 501(c)3 nonprofit. That means they don't have to disclose their donors. On top of this, there are some notes in the ProPublica site (linked below) that there have been some financial conflicts of interest for them lately. I wrote to them and asked if they would disclose their donors. As of this writing, I've not heard back and will update if I do.
Neither of these things automatically negates their work, but it does open the door to legitimate questions about their conclusions and their motivations.
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/814308701