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The Strange Villainization of the Walkable City

News Feed
Friday, May 31, 2024

Imagine you live in a town where everyday essentials like work, food, school, health care, and cultural activities all lie within a quick walk or bike ride from people’s homes. Your city has reduced residents’ reliance on car travel, freed you from your hellish commutes, and reconnected communities with one another. Public transit is reliable, concrete expanses have been transformed into lush green space, and carbon emissions are plummeting.This was the idea sketched by Carlos Moreno, the Sorbonne University professor who pioneered the “15-minute city.” A computer scientist by training, Moreno spent the mid-2000s designing digital energy-management platforms to address urban sustainability. But he became convinced that tech-centered approaches would not solve cities’ problems. He began developing the 15-minute city idea, introducing it at the United Nations’ COP21 Climate Conference in 2015, and working with city leaders to test practices that could bring people closer to their needs and help improve environmental outcomes. Then came the Covid-19 pandemic, which brought a flood of high-profile attention to the 15-minute city. A group of nearly 100 mayors committed to implementing it in some form as a means toward a climate-friendly recovery from the crisis. At COP26 in 2021, architects put the strategy at the center of discussions of sustainable city development goals. The World Economic Forum released slick videos and articles endorsing the 15-minute city. It’s probably no wonder, then, that the 15-minute city eventually penetrated the tinfoil hats of the far right. In 2023, climate deniers, QAnon types, radical libertarians, anti-vaxxers, and white supremacists seized on the World Economic Forum’s elite support for the idea. Fringe narratives made it synonymous with “climate lockdowns” and the “great reset,” in which governments would confine residents to open-air prisons, restricting and surveilling their movements (and perhaps forcing them to eat bugs). Online conspiracists compared the 15-minute city to the Warsaw Ghetto. Reactionary self-help author Jordan B. Peterson called it a scheme by “idiot tyrannical bureaucrats” to tell you where you’re allowed to drive. Moreno, in the normal course of events, became a lightning rod for insane abuse and death threats.Conspiracists have little to fear, as Moreno’s resolutely non-sinister new book, The 15-Minute City: A Solution to Saving Our Time and Our Planet, makes plain. To the decades of poor urban planning that have hastened climate emergency and caused dire “fragmentation,” Moreno poses a utopian solution: “happy proximity.” “We seek to foster mixed-use urban neighborhoods and living spaces that build strong links between people, strengthen social cohesion, and promote a better quality of life,” he writes. The book outlines a moderate program for a sustainable urban future, in which city officials enact incremental policy changes—more bike paths, better public transit, broader green space—that largely rely on private capital and pose little threat to the political status quo. But the thinking behind these features also evokes a more radical egalitarian vision, one that could decentralize work, improve neighborhood solidarity, and help end exploitative economic relationships, expanding our free time and reducing neighborhood displacement along the way. Our current predicament owes, in part, to the planning principles of the twentieth century. The Athens Charter, a 1933 document published by renowned architect Le Corbusier and the International Congress of Modern Architecture, promoted the “radiant city,” an idealized plan that would zone urban areas for distinct uses: high-rise residential districts surrounded by green space, with separate industrial and commercial zones, all connected by high-speed transportation infrastructure. This aim to rationalize modern cities became enormously influential in postwar planning worldwide.But the radiant city had its discontents. The construction of highways in places like New York and Paris wiped out whole neighborhoods, separated communities, and damaged the environment. Residential areas sprawled into the suburban outskirts. Car dependency and long commutes to work became the norm, eating into people’s precious free time. (Later came gentrification, as affluent suburbanites returned to the urban core.) “This expansion,” Moreno writes, “has occurred at the expense of proximity, community, and the traditional activities of city life, such as local markets, walks, and urban nature.” Some modern thinkers fought to preserve more traditional neighborhood cohesion. In the midcentury, activist Jane Jacobs and her neighbors shot down a proposed highway that urban planner Robert Moses aimed to build through Lower Manhattan, and residents of Amsterdam kept their city bike-friendly by rejecting a destructive development plan. Meanwhile, some workplaces tried teleworking as early as the 1970s as a means of reducing commutes—it was an attempt at “bringing work to the worker”—but neither the tech nor the incentives for employers were strong enough to sustain it. Today, Moreno argues, we must again take up Jacobs’s call for cities that operate at a “human scale.”In order to foster greater proximity, Moreno favors the idea of the “neighborhood unit,” in which cities are divided into autonomous, self-sufficient areas that provide residents with access to all essentials. He promotes no single model—no “magic copy-and-paste”—to achieve this end. Instead, buttressed by manifesto-like questions and kooky PowerPoint-style infographics, Moreno encourages broad measures: moving away from rigid zoning rules that separate city functions and toward greater versatility of uses. These changes, he claims, will advance more equitable cities, combat gentrification, and improve sustainability. “Our radical rethinking of our urban present is a crucial step toward transforming our cities into more balanced and fulfilling living spaces,” he writes.There is, of course, a limit to how “radical” any policy can be when rammed through the meat grinder of liberal urban politics. One useful thing about the 15-minute city, as an idea, is that it asks planners to actually plan: to make thoughtful decisions about the entire urban ecosystem, what it contains, and for whom. The 15-minute city asks planners to actually plan: to make thoughtful decisions about the entire urban ecosystem, what it contains, and for whom.Yet city planning today is hamstrung by fiscal austerity and obsessed with economic growth. So much of it is outsourced to the private sector. Cities can try to diversify uses by reforming zoning, discouraging car use, and greening their concrete wastelands, but it’s largely up to developers where things like housing and health clinics and grocery stores go. Typically, they are built where there’s capital to extract—and not, for example, in poor communities of color. “There are aspects of this for which we do not have a solution,” Moreno told Politico in 2022, “because it’s a matter that’s up to private enterprise to change.”Still, many cities are making changes under the banner of the 15-minute city, mostly for the good. Mayors of the C40 Cities, a climate leadership organization, have been marketing the approach as an environmental remedy since at least 2015, when more than 1,000 gathered for the Paris climate summit. Since 2017, Paris itself has been working with Moreno’s research team to implement some version of the 15-minute city. In the time since then, the city has created 746 miles of protected bike paths, transformed highways along the Seine into pedestrian spaces, and established new community meeting places on school grounds. It has also redeveloped former industrial sites into multipurpose areas that include educational facilities, public housing, and vegetable gardens.In 2020, the C40 cities officially adopted the 15-minute city as a strategy for managing the shock of the Covid-19 pandemic, and many have tried some of its tenets. Cleveland, a onetime automotive town hit hard by deindustrialization and the subprime mortgage crisis, committed in 2022 to investing $3.5 million into safety improvements for cyclists and pedestrians, greening streets, and changing the zoning code to require public transit options with new development instead of off-street parking. Buenos Aires, Argentina, home to suffocating car traffic and rising heat waves, recently replaced swathes of pavement with vegetation and changed the building code of its central business district, where many office buildings now sit empty, to encourage mixed-use development. Busan, a tech-sector stronghold in South Korea, promised a 15-minute city initiative that will launch new living facilities focused on walking, competitions to design pedestrian-friendly environments, and pilot sites where public-private partnerships will help develop parks and infrastructure. These changes are positive, if relatively modest. Moreno offers them, alongside other happy examples—from Portland, Oregon, to Tunisia to Melbourne—as evidence that the 15-minute city has become a “global movement.” “With proximity at its heart,” he writes, “it mobilizes a vast amount of creative energy to achieve a balance previously thought impossible: reconciling the fight against climate change with economic development, while promoting the social inclusion of the inhabitants of our towns and cities.” At the same time, it’s unclear whether these initiatives are measurably improving people’s experiences of walkability, services, or local ecology—let alone how, in the absence of tenant protections, they might accelerate gentrification. As yet, the record is short on evidence and long on breathless public statements from mayors bedazzled by a new urbanist buzzword.It’s easy to see why the 15-minute city has captured the imagination of both liberal policymakers and right-wing conspiracists who are leery of their authority. From one perspective it’s a slick advertisement for the modern city-as-commodity, while from the other it conceals a perfect authoritarian plot. In Oxford, an English city that introduced some 15-minute planning concepts in 2022—such as traffic controls that would limit car congestion—thousands of protesters filled the streets, calling the change “dystopian.” Some demonstrators were arrested. Local media figures and the 1990s pop band Right Said Fred warned residents of dire threats to their “personal freedom.” The protesters, as one local representative said, seemed to overestimate officials’ competence to carry out malevolent plans. Frankly, they may also overestimate officials’ desire to carry out benevolent plans as well.From one perspective it’s a slick advertisement for the modern city-as-commodity, while from the other it conceals a perfect authoritarian plot. Beneath these ludicrous confrontations lie more consequential ones. Pollution from urban areas is damaging not only to the natural environment but to residents’ health and well-being, as The 15-Minute City notes. Cities are responsible for more than 70 percent of global carbon emissions, according to the International Energy Agency, contributing to rising global temperatures and declining air quality. Increasingly, cities relegate working people of color to the outlying sprawl, imposing long trips to work and even to buy groceries. But bringing decentralizing workplaces closer to homes, increasing access to urgent needs, and reducing car dependency are long-term projects, ones that will undoubtedly face resistance from developers, auto manufacturers, and the fossil fuel industry. Moreno has little to say about how residents themselves might direct these changes. But it’s clear that it will require community-led action to meaningfully disrupt powerful interests. In a recent video essay about 15-minute cities on the Radical Planning YouTube channel, the urban planner host notes that leftist activists in Barcelona, inspired by the lack of car traffic and improved air quality during the pandemic, wrote a public manifesto in 2020 demanding a reorganization of the city that would encourage equity, affordability, and climate remediation. Their ideas included investing in free bike and public transit infrastructure, expanding tree canopies and green space, building public housing to reduce displacement, and curbing tourism to rein in harmful forms of economic growth. These demands would apply differently in different cities, but they give a taste of what a more fully realized 15-minute city, directed by popular appetite and opposed to limitless extraction, could encompass. “​​The question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from that of what kind of social ties, relationship to nature, lifestyles, technologies, and aesthetic values we desire,” wrote urban geographer David Harvey in 2008, in the wake of the last global crisis. “The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization.” Today, our cities are organized around the profit-seeking of elites, who believe that the city is their right. It’s this arrangement that’s truly unsustainable. In the years to come, as we face down radical climate change, it will take just such an exercise of collective power to reshape our cities in ways that serve a common right of urban well-being for all. As an expression of this collective “right to the city” for ordinary people, we could do much worse than the 15-minute ideal.

Imagine you live in a town where everyday essentials like work, food, school, health care, and cultural activities all lie within a quick walk or bike ride from people’s homes. Your city has reduced residents’ reliance on car travel, freed you from your hellish commutes, and reconnected communities with one another. Public transit is reliable, concrete expanses have been transformed into lush green space, and carbon emissions are plummeting.This was the idea sketched by Carlos Moreno, the Sorbonne University professor who pioneered the “15-minute city.” A computer scientist by training, Moreno spent the mid-2000s designing digital energy-management platforms to address urban sustainability. But he became convinced that tech-centered approaches would not solve cities’ problems. He began developing the 15-minute city idea, introducing it at the United Nations’ COP21 Climate Conference in 2015, and working with city leaders to test practices that could bring people closer to their needs and help improve environmental outcomes. Then came the Covid-19 pandemic, which brought a flood of high-profile attention to the 15-minute city. A group of nearly 100 mayors committed to implementing it in some form as a means toward a climate-friendly recovery from the crisis. At COP26 in 2021, architects put the strategy at the center of discussions of sustainable city development goals. The World Economic Forum released slick videos and articles endorsing the 15-minute city. It’s probably no wonder, then, that the 15-minute city eventually penetrated the tinfoil hats of the far right. In 2023, climate deniers, QAnon types, radical libertarians, anti-vaxxers, and white supremacists seized on the World Economic Forum’s elite support for the idea. Fringe narratives made it synonymous with “climate lockdowns” and the “great reset,” in which governments would confine residents to open-air prisons, restricting and surveilling their movements (and perhaps forcing them to eat bugs). Online conspiracists compared the 15-minute city to the Warsaw Ghetto. Reactionary self-help author Jordan B. Peterson called it a scheme by “idiot tyrannical bureaucrats” to tell you where you’re allowed to drive. Moreno, in the normal course of events, became a lightning rod for insane abuse and death threats.Conspiracists have little to fear, as Moreno’s resolutely non-sinister new book, The 15-Minute City: A Solution to Saving Our Time and Our Planet, makes plain. To the decades of poor urban planning that have hastened climate emergency and caused dire “fragmentation,” Moreno poses a utopian solution: “happy proximity.” “We seek to foster mixed-use urban neighborhoods and living spaces that build strong links between people, strengthen social cohesion, and promote a better quality of life,” he writes. The book outlines a moderate program for a sustainable urban future, in which city officials enact incremental policy changes—more bike paths, better public transit, broader green space—that largely rely on private capital and pose little threat to the political status quo. But the thinking behind these features also evokes a more radical egalitarian vision, one that could decentralize work, improve neighborhood solidarity, and help end exploitative economic relationships, expanding our free time and reducing neighborhood displacement along the way. Our current predicament owes, in part, to the planning principles of the twentieth century. The Athens Charter, a 1933 document published by renowned architect Le Corbusier and the International Congress of Modern Architecture, promoted the “radiant city,” an idealized plan that would zone urban areas for distinct uses: high-rise residential districts surrounded by green space, with separate industrial and commercial zones, all connected by high-speed transportation infrastructure. This aim to rationalize modern cities became enormously influential in postwar planning worldwide.But the radiant city had its discontents. The construction of highways in places like New York and Paris wiped out whole neighborhoods, separated communities, and damaged the environment. Residential areas sprawled into the suburban outskirts. Car dependency and long commutes to work became the norm, eating into people’s precious free time. (Later came gentrification, as affluent suburbanites returned to the urban core.) “This expansion,” Moreno writes, “has occurred at the expense of proximity, community, and the traditional activities of city life, such as local markets, walks, and urban nature.” Some modern thinkers fought to preserve more traditional neighborhood cohesion. In the midcentury, activist Jane Jacobs and her neighbors shot down a proposed highway that urban planner Robert Moses aimed to build through Lower Manhattan, and residents of Amsterdam kept their city bike-friendly by rejecting a destructive development plan. Meanwhile, some workplaces tried teleworking as early as the 1970s as a means of reducing commutes—it was an attempt at “bringing work to the worker”—but neither the tech nor the incentives for employers were strong enough to sustain it. Today, Moreno argues, we must again take up Jacobs’s call for cities that operate at a “human scale.”In order to foster greater proximity, Moreno favors the idea of the “neighborhood unit,” in which cities are divided into autonomous, self-sufficient areas that provide residents with access to all essentials. He promotes no single model—no “magic copy-and-paste”—to achieve this end. Instead, buttressed by manifesto-like questions and kooky PowerPoint-style infographics, Moreno encourages broad measures: moving away from rigid zoning rules that separate city functions and toward greater versatility of uses. These changes, he claims, will advance more equitable cities, combat gentrification, and improve sustainability. “Our radical rethinking of our urban present is a crucial step toward transforming our cities into more balanced and fulfilling living spaces,” he writes.There is, of course, a limit to how “radical” any policy can be when rammed through the meat grinder of liberal urban politics. One useful thing about the 15-minute city, as an idea, is that it asks planners to actually plan: to make thoughtful decisions about the entire urban ecosystem, what it contains, and for whom. The 15-minute city asks planners to actually plan: to make thoughtful decisions about the entire urban ecosystem, what it contains, and for whom.Yet city planning today is hamstrung by fiscal austerity and obsessed with economic growth. So much of it is outsourced to the private sector. Cities can try to diversify uses by reforming zoning, discouraging car use, and greening their concrete wastelands, but it’s largely up to developers where things like housing and health clinics and grocery stores go. Typically, they are built where there’s capital to extract—and not, for example, in poor communities of color. “There are aspects of this for which we do not have a solution,” Moreno told Politico in 2022, “because it’s a matter that’s up to private enterprise to change.”Still, many cities are making changes under the banner of the 15-minute city, mostly for the good. Mayors of the C40 Cities, a climate leadership organization, have been marketing the approach as an environmental remedy since at least 2015, when more than 1,000 gathered for the Paris climate summit. Since 2017, Paris itself has been working with Moreno’s research team to implement some version of the 15-minute city. In the time since then, the city has created 746 miles of protected bike paths, transformed highways along the Seine into pedestrian spaces, and established new community meeting places on school grounds. It has also redeveloped former industrial sites into multipurpose areas that include educational facilities, public housing, and vegetable gardens.In 2020, the C40 cities officially adopted the 15-minute city as a strategy for managing the shock of the Covid-19 pandemic, and many have tried some of its tenets. Cleveland, a onetime automotive town hit hard by deindustrialization and the subprime mortgage crisis, committed in 2022 to investing $3.5 million into safety improvements for cyclists and pedestrians, greening streets, and changing the zoning code to require public transit options with new development instead of off-street parking. Buenos Aires, Argentina, home to suffocating car traffic and rising heat waves, recently replaced swathes of pavement with vegetation and changed the building code of its central business district, where many office buildings now sit empty, to encourage mixed-use development. Busan, a tech-sector stronghold in South Korea, promised a 15-minute city initiative that will launch new living facilities focused on walking, competitions to design pedestrian-friendly environments, and pilot sites where public-private partnerships will help develop parks and infrastructure. These changes are positive, if relatively modest. Moreno offers them, alongside other happy examples—from Portland, Oregon, to Tunisia to Melbourne—as evidence that the 15-minute city has become a “global movement.” “With proximity at its heart,” he writes, “it mobilizes a vast amount of creative energy to achieve a balance previously thought impossible: reconciling the fight against climate change with economic development, while promoting the social inclusion of the inhabitants of our towns and cities.” At the same time, it’s unclear whether these initiatives are measurably improving people’s experiences of walkability, services, or local ecology—let alone how, in the absence of tenant protections, they might accelerate gentrification. As yet, the record is short on evidence and long on breathless public statements from mayors bedazzled by a new urbanist buzzword.It’s easy to see why the 15-minute city has captured the imagination of both liberal policymakers and right-wing conspiracists who are leery of their authority. From one perspective it’s a slick advertisement for the modern city-as-commodity, while from the other it conceals a perfect authoritarian plot. In Oxford, an English city that introduced some 15-minute planning concepts in 2022—such as traffic controls that would limit car congestion—thousands of protesters filled the streets, calling the change “dystopian.” Some demonstrators were arrested. Local media figures and the 1990s pop band Right Said Fred warned residents of dire threats to their “personal freedom.” The protesters, as one local representative said, seemed to overestimate officials’ competence to carry out malevolent plans. Frankly, they may also overestimate officials’ desire to carry out benevolent plans as well.From one perspective it’s a slick advertisement for the modern city-as-commodity, while from the other it conceals a perfect authoritarian plot. Beneath these ludicrous confrontations lie more consequential ones. Pollution from urban areas is damaging not only to the natural environment but to residents’ health and well-being, as The 15-Minute City notes. Cities are responsible for more than 70 percent of global carbon emissions, according to the International Energy Agency, contributing to rising global temperatures and declining air quality. Increasingly, cities relegate working people of color to the outlying sprawl, imposing long trips to work and even to buy groceries. But bringing decentralizing workplaces closer to homes, increasing access to urgent needs, and reducing car dependency are long-term projects, ones that will undoubtedly face resistance from developers, auto manufacturers, and the fossil fuel industry. Moreno has little to say about how residents themselves might direct these changes. But it’s clear that it will require community-led action to meaningfully disrupt powerful interests. In a recent video essay about 15-minute cities on the Radical Planning YouTube channel, the urban planner host notes that leftist activists in Barcelona, inspired by the lack of car traffic and improved air quality during the pandemic, wrote a public manifesto in 2020 demanding a reorganization of the city that would encourage equity, affordability, and climate remediation. Their ideas included investing in free bike and public transit infrastructure, expanding tree canopies and green space, building public housing to reduce displacement, and curbing tourism to rein in harmful forms of economic growth. These demands would apply differently in different cities, but they give a taste of what a more fully realized 15-minute city, directed by popular appetite and opposed to limitless extraction, could encompass. “​​The question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from that of what kind of social ties, relationship to nature, lifestyles, technologies, and aesthetic values we desire,” wrote urban geographer David Harvey in 2008, in the wake of the last global crisis. “The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization.” Today, our cities are organized around the profit-seeking of elites, who believe that the city is their right. It’s this arrangement that’s truly unsustainable. In the years to come, as we face down radical climate change, it will take just such an exercise of collective power to reshape our cities in ways that serve a common right of urban well-being for all. As an expression of this collective “right to the city” for ordinary people, we could do much worse than the 15-minute ideal.

Imagine you live in a town where everyday essentials like work, food, school, health care, and cultural activities all lie within a quick walk or bike ride from people’s homes. Your city has reduced residents’ reliance on car travel, freed you from your hellish commutes, and reconnected communities with one another. Public transit is reliable, concrete expanses have been transformed into lush green space, and carbon emissions are plummeting.

This was the idea sketched by Carlos Moreno, the Sorbonne University professor who pioneered the “15-minute city.” A computer scientist by training, Moreno spent the mid-2000s designing digital energy-management platforms to address urban sustainability. But he became convinced that tech-centered approaches would not solve cities’ problems. He began developing the 15-minute city idea, introducing it at the United Nations’ COP21 Climate Conference in 2015, and working with city leaders to test practices that could bring people closer to their needs and help improve environmental outcomes.

Then came the Covid-19 pandemic, which brought a flood of high-profile attention to the 15-minute city. A group of nearly 100 mayors committed to implementing it in some form as a means toward a climate-friendly recovery from the crisis. At COP26 in 2021, architects put the strategy at the center of discussions of sustainable city development goals. The World Economic Forum released slick videos and articles endorsing the 15-minute city.

It’s probably no wonder, then, that the 15-minute city eventually penetrated the tinfoil hats of the far right. In 2023, climate deniers, QAnon types, radical libertarians, anti-vaxxers, and white supremacists seized on the World Economic Forum’s elite support for the idea. Fringe narratives made it synonymous with “climate lockdowns” and the “great reset,” in which governments would confine residents to open-air prisons, restricting and surveilling their movements (and perhaps forcing them to eat bugs). Online conspiracists compared the 15-minute city to the Warsaw Ghetto. Reactionary self-help author Jordan B. Peterson called it a scheme by “idiot tyrannical bureaucrats” to tell you where you’re allowed to drive. Moreno, in the normal course of events, became a lightning rod for insane abuse and death threats.

Conspiracists have little to fear, as Moreno’s resolutely non-sinister new book, The 15-Minute City: A Solution to Saving Our Time and Our Planet, makes plain. To the decades of poor urban planning that have hastened climate emergency and caused dire “fragmentation,” Moreno poses a utopian solution: “happy proximity.” “We seek to foster mixed-use urban neighborhoods and living spaces that build strong links between people, strengthen social cohesion, and promote a better quality of life,” he writes. The book outlines a moderate program for a sustainable urban future, in which city officials enact incremental policy changes—more bike paths, better public transit, broader green space—that largely rely on private capital and pose little threat to the political status quo. But the thinking behind these features also evokes a more radical egalitarian vision, one that could decentralize work, improve neighborhood solidarity, and help end exploitative economic relationships, expanding our free time and reducing neighborhood displacement along the way.


Our current predicament owes, in part, to the planning principles of the twentieth century. The Athens Charter, a 1933 document published by renowned architect Le Corbusier and the International Congress of Modern Architecture, promoted the “radiant city,” an idealized plan that would zone urban areas for distinct uses: high-rise residential districts surrounded by green space, with separate industrial and commercial zones, all connected by high-speed transportation infrastructure. This aim to rationalize modern cities became enormously influential in postwar planning worldwide.

But the radiant city had its discontents. The construction of highways in places like New York and Paris wiped out whole neighborhoods, separated communities, and damaged the environment. Residential areas sprawled into the suburban outskirts. Car dependency and long commutes to work became the norm, eating into people’s precious free time. (Later came gentrification, as affluent suburbanites returned to the urban core.) “This expansion,” Moreno writes, “has occurred at the expense of proximity, community, and the traditional activities of city life, such as local markets, walks, and urban nature.”

Some modern thinkers fought to preserve more traditional neighborhood cohesion. In the midcentury, activist Jane Jacobs and her neighbors shot down a proposed highway that urban planner Robert Moses aimed to build through Lower Manhattan, and residents of Amsterdam kept their city bike-friendly by rejecting a destructive development plan. Meanwhile, some workplaces tried teleworking as early as the 1970s as a means of reducing commutes—it was an attempt at “bringing work to the worker”—but neither the tech nor the incentives for employers were strong enough to sustain it. Today, Moreno argues, we must again take up Jacobs’s call for cities that operate at a “human scale.”

In order to foster greater proximity, Moreno favors the idea of the “neighborhood unit,” in which cities are divided into autonomous, self-sufficient areas that provide residents with access to all essentials. He promotes no single model—no “magic copy-and-paste”—to achieve this end. Instead, buttressed by manifesto-like questions and kooky PowerPoint-style infographics, Moreno encourages broad measures: moving away from rigid zoning rules that separate city functions and toward greater versatility of uses. These changes, he claims, will advance more equitable cities, combat gentrification, and improve sustainability. “Our radical rethinking of our urban present is a crucial step toward transforming our cities into more balanced and fulfilling living spaces,” he writes.


There is, of course, a limit to how “radical” any policy can be when rammed through the meat grinder of liberal urban politics. One useful thing about the 15-minute city, as an idea, is that it asks planners to actually plan: to make thoughtful decisions about the entire urban ecosystem, what it contains, and for whom.

Yet city planning today is hamstrung by fiscal austerity and obsessed with economic growth. So much of it is outsourced to the private sector. Cities can try to diversify uses by reforming zoning, discouraging car use, and greening their concrete wastelands, but it’s largely up to developers where things like housing and health clinics and grocery stores go. Typically, they are built where there’s capital to extract—and not, for example, in poor communities of color. “There are aspects of this for which we do not have a solution,” Moreno told Politico in 2022, “because it’s a matter that’s up to private enterprise to change.”

Still, many cities are making changes under the banner of the 15-minute city, mostly for the good. Mayors of the C40 Cities, a climate leadership organization, have been marketing the approach as an environmental remedy since at least 2015, when more than 1,000 gathered for the Paris climate summit. Since 2017, Paris itself has been working with Moreno’s research team to implement some version of the 15-minute city. In the time since then, the city has created 746 miles of protected bike paths, transformed highways along the Seine into pedestrian spaces, and established new community meeting places on school grounds. It has also redeveloped former industrial sites into multipurpose areas that include educational facilities, public housing, and vegetable gardens.

In 2020, the C40 cities officially adopted the 15-minute city as a strategy for managing the shock of the Covid-19 pandemic, and many have tried some of its tenets. Cleveland, a onetime automotive town hit hard by deindustrialization and the subprime mortgage crisis, committed in 2022 to investing $3.5 million into safety improvements for cyclists and pedestrians, greening streets, and changing the zoning code to require public transit options with new development instead of off-street parking. Buenos Aires, Argentina, home to suffocating car traffic and rising heat waves, recently replaced swathes of pavement with vegetation and changed the building code of its central business district, where many office buildings now sit empty, to encourage mixed-use development. Busan, a tech-sector stronghold in South Korea, promised a 15-minute city initiative that will launch new living facilities focused on walking, competitions to design pedestrian-friendly environments, and pilot sites where public-private partnerships will help develop parks and infrastructure.

These changes are positive, if relatively modest. Moreno offers them, alongside other happy examples—from Portland, Oregon, to Tunisia to Melbourne—as evidence that the 15-minute city has become a “global movement.” “With proximity at its heart,” he writes, “it mobilizes a vast amount of creative energy to achieve a balance previously thought impossible: reconciling the fight against climate change with economic development, while promoting the social inclusion of the inhabitants of our towns and cities.” At the same time, it’s unclear whether these initiatives are measurably improving people’s experiences of walkability, services, or local ecology—let alone how, in the absence of tenant protections, they might accelerate gentrification. As yet, the record is short on evidence and long on breathless public statements from mayors bedazzled by a new urbanist buzzword.


It’s easy to see why the 15-minute city has captured the imagination of both liberal policymakers and right-wing conspiracists who are leery of their authority. From one perspective it’s a slick advertisement for the modern city-as-commodity, while from the other it conceals a perfect authoritarian plot. In Oxford, an English city that introduced some 15-minute planning concepts in 2022—such as traffic controls that would limit car congestion—thousands of protesters filled the streets, calling the change “dystopian.” Some demonstrators were arrested. Local media figures and the 1990s pop band Right Said Fred warned residents of dire threats to their “personal freedom.” The protesters, as one local representative said, seemed to overestimate officials’ competence to carry out malevolent plans. Frankly, they may also overestimate officials’ desire to carry out benevolent plans as well.

Beneath these ludicrous confrontations lie more consequential ones. Pollution from urban areas is damaging not only to the natural environment but to residents’ health and well-being, as The 15-Minute City notes. Cities are responsible for more than 70 percent of global carbon emissions, according to the International Energy Agency, contributing to rising global temperatures and declining air quality. Increasingly, cities relegate working people of color to the outlying sprawl, imposing long trips to work and even to buy groceries. But bringing decentralizing workplaces closer to homes, increasing access to urgent needs, and reducing car dependency are long-term projects, ones that will undoubtedly face resistance from developers, auto manufacturers, and the fossil fuel industry.

Moreno has little to say about how residents themselves might direct these changes. But it’s clear that it will require community-led action to meaningfully disrupt powerful interests. In a recent video essay about 15-minute cities on the Radical Planning YouTube channel, the urban planner host notes that leftist activists in Barcelona, inspired by the lack of car traffic and improved air quality during the pandemic, wrote a public manifesto in 2020 demanding a reorganization of the city that would encourage equity, affordability, and climate remediation. Their ideas included investing in free bike and public transit infrastructure, expanding tree canopies and green space, building public housing to reduce displacement, and curbing tourism to rein in harmful forms of economic growth. These demands would apply differently in different cities, but they give a taste of what a more fully realized 15-minute city, directed by popular appetite and opposed to limitless extraction, could encompass.

“​​The question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from that of what kind of social ties, relationship to nature, lifestyles, technologies, and aesthetic values we desire,” wrote urban geographer David Harvey in 2008, in the wake of the last global crisis. “The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization.” Today, our cities are organized around the profit-seeking of elites, who believe that the city is their right. It’s this arrangement that’s truly unsustainable. In the years to come, as we face down radical climate change, it will take just such an exercise of collective power to reshape our cities in ways that serve a common right of urban well-being for all. As an expression of this collective “right to the city” for ordinary people, we could do much worse than the 15-minute ideal.

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Jimmy Carter Wasn’t a Liberal

Timothy Noah is a staff writer at the New Republic and a former labor policy editor at POLITICO.

Everybody knows that Jimmy Carter was America’s last truly liberal president until Barack Obama. But everybody is wrong. Carter was the first in the conservative line of presidents more commonly associated with Ronald Reagan.Carter’s 1980 defeat by Reagan, after serving a single term, “marked the decline and fall of the public’s faith in statist liberalism,” the late Sen. Jesse Helms (R.-N.C.) once said. A more favorable popular conceit, as described by the journalist Nicholas Lemann, is that Carter was “too much the good-hearted liberal to maintain a hold on the presidential electorate.”These misconceptions seem plausible today because Carter’s four-decade post-presidency was notably more left-leaning than his presidency ever was. The ex-president’s peace missions to North Korea and Cuba and his frequent criticisms of U.S. policies regarding everything from the Palestinians (whose treatment by Israel he famously likened to apartheid) to domestic surveillance (“unprecedented violations of our rights to privacy”) positioned Carter well to the left of Republican and Democratic successors alike.Historical memory of Carter’s presidency is also distorted by a failure to consider his administration’s policies in their proper historical context. The creation of the Education Department, for example, or passage of the oil windfall profits tax, seem liberal only when you forget that the political spectrum drifted rightward for three decades after Carter left office. Judged outside that context, even many of Reagan’s policies today seem liberal.In truth, the pendulum started swinging to the right before Carter took office, and continued doing so under Carter’s presidency. Reagan didn’t change the pendulum’s direction; he just accelerated its speed.Carter’s two Democratic predecessors in the White House, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, spoke expansively of what government could do. Carter, a former governor in the conservative Deep South, preferred to point out that there was much government couldn’t do. “There is a limit to the role and the function of government,” Carter said in his 1978 State of the Union speech. “Government cannot solve our problems.”Reagan would subsequently rework that statement (in his first inaugural address) into “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” which carried the thought much further than Carter ever would. Nor would Carter have likely declared, as President Bill Clinton did in 1996, that “the era of big government is over.”But Carter’s warning about government’s limitations, anodyne though it may seem today, shocked liberals at the time. “Can anyone imagine Franklin D. Roosevelt talking this way?” fumed the historian and political activist Arthur Schlesinger Jr. “Can anyone imagine Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, or George McGovern uttering those words?” Carter, Schlesinger concluded, “is not a Democrat — at least in anything more recent than the Grover Cleveland sense of the word.”Bob Shrum, the liberal Democratic operative who would later be a political consultant to Al Gore’s and John Kerry’s presidential campaigns, found Carter so hesitant to support liberal positions that he quit Carter’s 1976 campaign after 10 days. “Your strategy is largely designed to conceal your true convictions,” Shrum wrote in his resignation letter, “whatever they may be.” Four years later Shrum was a speechwriter for Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), who in the Democratic presidential primaries challenged Carter, unsuccessfully, from the left.If Shrum was a fish out of water with Carter, Carter was a fish out of water among Kennedy and other liberal Democrats. “I feel more at home with the conservative Democratic and Republican members of Congress than I do the others,” he confided in his White House diary, “although the liberals vote with me more often.”The New Deal liberal ascendancy with which Carter is wrongly associated ended around 1974. It was killed off by the white backlash to the civil rights movement, which ended Democratic dominance in the South; by the Vietnam war, which ended Lyndon Johnson’s presidency and split the Democrats into warring factions; by the 1973 Arab oil embargo, which ended permanently the widely shared prosperity that undergirded liberal policies after 1945; and by the Watergate scandal that expelled Richard Nixon from the White House.This last might seem counterintuitive, given that Nixon was a Republican much reviled by liberal Democrats. And indeed, Watergate’s immediate consequences were a Democratic congressional sweep in 1974 (the so-called “Watergate babies”) and Carter’s own narrow victory over Gerald Ford two years later. But Vietnam’s “credibility gap” and Watergate’s outright criminality undermined the public’s faith in government, a shift that over the long term mostly benefited the anti-government right.Watergate also put Ford, a Republican notably more conservative than Nixon, into the Oval Office. Nixon’s domestic policies, it’s often observed, were largely a continuation of New Deal liberalism (the main exception, ironic given Nixon’s own law-breaking, being the area of criminal justice). Among other actions, Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency (the regulatory agency most hated by conservatives today); proposed what amounted to a guaranteed family income; and imposed wage and price controls. It’s difficult to imagine Ford — who would expel Henry Kissinger for being too pro-détente, deny New York City a bailout when it verged on bankruptcy, and look nervously over his shoulder at a right-flank primary challenge from Reagan — doing any of these things.But tempting though it is to name Ford rather than Carter the first president of the conservative ascendancy, he must be denied that prize, for three reasons. First, he was in the White House only two years, barely enough time to change the drapes. Second, political circumstances required Ford to focus mainly on calming the waters after the “long national nightmare” that was Watergate. Third, Ford was temperamentally inclined, as former House minority leader in a Congress far more courteous and clubby than today’s, to work cooperatively.Carter was a different animal altogether.It would be wrong to call Carter himself a conservative. He was instead a Southern liberal, which meant that from a national perspective he was a somewhat conservative Democrat. He was fiscally conservative, and bequeathed Reagan a budget deficit of about $74 billion. That was thought high at the time, but within five years Reagan had more than doubled it, after inflation. As a percentage of GDP, the deficit fell under Carter; it would rise under Reagan, who preached fiscal conservatism but did not practice it.The twin pillars of conservatism today are opposition to taxes and opposition to regulation. These first came to the fore during Carter’s presidency.On taxes, Carter’s own ambitions were liberal. But he couldn’t sell his progressive tax reform to Congress because a nationwide tax revolt was spreading, sparked by passage of Proposition 13, a California initiative limiting property taxes. That revolt can be blamed, at least in part, on Carter for failing to address effectively the out-of-control inflation that was jacking up home values (and therefore property taxes). Even here, though, it should be remembered that the government official widely credited with finally curbing, in the early 1980s, the decadelong Great Inflation was Paul Volcker, chair of the Federal Reserve Board — and a Carter appointee.With his tax reform a dead letter, Carter signed into law instead a 1978 bill initiated by Rep. Jack Kemp (R-N.Y.) and Sen. William Roth (R-Del.) that lowered substantially the capital gains tax. The rest, as they say, is history. “Emboldened by their ability to force a Democratic president and Congress to enact what was essentially a conservative tax bill,” Kemp aide Bruce Bartlett would later recall, Kemp and Roth “pressed on with more radical tax reduction efforts” that won enthusiastic support from candidate Reagan and were enacted in 1981. This second Kemp-Roth tax bill is now remembered as the signature legislative embodiment of supply-side economics, the reigning economic doctrine of the Reagan years.The Carter era also saw calls for government deregulation begin to take fruit. Carter’s focus was on economic deregulation, a cause then supported even by liberals like Ted Kennedy and Ralph Nader on the theory that it would expose corporations to unwanted competition that would benefit consumers. It was under Carter that Congress passed significant bills deregulating the trucking, railroad and airline industries; these would be followed by more sweeping deregulation under Reagan, Bush and Clinton of bus travel, shipping, energy, telecommunications and banking, and by new statutory restrictions on health and safety regulations.The conservative movement has always valued a strong military. Carter is remembered as weak on defense because his April 1980 attempt to rescue Americans held hostage in Iran ended in ignominious failure. (The New Republic labeled it “The Jimmy Carter Desert Classic.”) But, particularly for a Democrat, Carter was notably pro-defense. He had, after all, spent 10 years in the Navy — more years of military service than any president since Dwight Eisenhower. Contrary to popular wisdom, it was Carter, not Reagan, who reversed the decline in military spending (after inflation) that followed U.S. withdrawal from the Vietnam War. Reagan would merely accelerate that rate of growth.Carter displeased conservatives by granting unconditional amnesty to Vietnam draft evaders, which infuriated hawks at the time. But Carter’s program merely expanded a clemency program Ford had instituted three years earlier. Nor was the amnesty as “unconditional” as advertised; in his 2008 book “The Age of Reagan,” the historian Sean Wilentz observed that it “sustained many of the burdens imposed by Ford” and that as a result “very few Vietnam-era military deserters and AWOLS would ever receive any form of legal relief.”Since the ‘80s it’s been de rigueur for presidential candidates of both parties to position themselves as Washington outsiders who will challenge the capital’s corrupt culture — a game at which Republicans bent on shrinking government enjoy a home field advantage. That competition began with Jimmy Carter.Carter’s whole campaign was predicated on the idea that America desperately needed someone to restore honesty and decency to government. “For a long time our American citizens have been excluded, sometimes misled, sometimes have been lied to,” he said in a 1976 debate with Ford. Carter promised to be different: “I’ll never tell a lie. I’ll never make a misleading statement. I’ll never betray the confidence that any of you has in me, and I will never avoid a controversial issue.” It was a preposterous and sanctimonious pledge, one no living, breathing politician could hope ever to live up to. But it was what voters wanted to hear after Watergate and Vietnam.Carter was also the first president of the modern era to legitimize, for good or ill, extensive discussion by a presidential candidate of his personal faith — another arena that would prove more hospitable to conservatives than liberals.Before Carter, U.S. presidents thought it in poor taste to go on too much about their religious beliefs. True, Eisenhower added “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance and formalized “In God We Trust” as the national motto, and he once said “I am the most intensely religious man I know.” But Ike wasn’t even a regular churchgoer before he became president, and he was never particularly voluble about his Presbyterianism (or about anything else). Kennedy saw his Catholic religion as more liability than asset, and neither LBJ nor Nixon, despite their many photo ops with the Rev. Billy Graham, was especially devout. Ford was, but would later explain, “I didn't think it was appropriate to advertise my religious beliefs.”Carter changed that. He was the first president ever to declare himself “born again,” and the first to rely on evangelicals to win the presidency. Carter’s election coincided with the politicization of evangelical Christianity, which would play a significant role in presidential politics during the 1980s and 1990s. But the movement’s conservatives quickly established political dominance with the establishment of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority in 1979 and the transformation of Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network from a small regional broadcast network to a national cable network. As a result, the evangelical vote shifted from Carter to Reagan. By 2000, Carter’s own Southern Baptist church had moved so far to the right — or perhaps he to the left — that he severed his ties to it.The rightward shift under Carter was slight compared to the changes that would come later under Reagan, whom the smartest political thinkers, before his 1980 victory, judged way too conservative to be elected president. (So much for smart political thinkers.) Minor adjustments to the New Deal political consensus under Carter became major adjustments during what historians properly term the Reagan era, which lasted at least until 2008 and in many respects lingers today. But the first president of that era wasn’t a former Hollywood actor turned governor. It was a former Naval engineer turned peanut farmer turned governor. That’s not a laurel Carter would have been pleased to receive, but it’s his just the same.

Activism
Animals
Culture

Sloths, Salmon, and Autocrats: Our Most-Read Articles of the Year

Solutions to our environmental ills abound in these popular Revelator articles from 2024. The post Sloths, Salmon, and Autocrats: Our Most-Read Articles of the Year appeared first on The Revelator.

Environmental news stories tend to slip through the cracks during election years — and this year we saw that like none other. Still, this year brought more readers than ever to The Revelator. People wanted to know about the environmental threats the planet faces — and how to stop them. Solutions stories were particularly popular this year, a sign that people are done with putting up with the status quo. Maintaining that energy and drive will be difficult but essential in 2025. Here’s a list of some of our most popular articles of 2024. They cover people helping sloths and other endangered species, studying our blind spots, building environmentally conscious communities, looking at the threats of autocracy, and fighting climate change. They should all continue to offer inspiration and guidance in the troublesome year(s) ahead. Adapt, Move or Die? Plants and Animals Face New Pressures in a Warming World All the Plants We Cannot See Antarctica’s Looming Threat Anthrax in Zimbabwe: Caused by Oppression, Worsened by Climate Change Are Botanists Endangered? Building a Flock: How an Unlikely Birder Found Activism — and Community — in Nature Burning Trees: As the Biomass Industry Grows, Its Carbon Emissions Go Uncounted Coastal Restoration: Recycled Shells and Millions of Larvae — A Recipe for Renewed Oyster Reefs Conservation Works — and Science Just Proved It Environmental Change, Written in the DNA of Birds In France, One Group Seeks to Do the Unthinkable: Unite the Climate Movement The Monumental Effort to Replant the Klamath River Dam Reservoirs Out-of-Control Wildlife Trade Is Shackling a Key Climate Solution Rock and Roll Botany: An Endangered Plant Named After Legendary Guitarist Jimi Hendrix Salmon Have Returned Above the Klamath River Dams. Now What? The Shocking Truth About Sloths Six Lessons From the World’s Deadliest Environmental Disaster Titicaca in Crisis: Climate Change Is Drying Up the Biggest Lake in the Andes Water and Cooperation Breathe New Life Into Klamath Basin Wildlife Refuges What 70 Celebrity Tortoises Can Teach Us About Conservation Stories We’re thankful for our readers this past year. We look forward to bringing you more essential reporting in the months ahead. The post Sloths, Salmon, and Autocrats: Our Most-Read Articles of the Year appeared first on The Revelator.

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Animals
Climate

We used Google’s AI to analyze 188 predictions of what’s in store for tech in 2025

At this time of year investment banks, advertising agencies, and seemingly every other business on the planet share their predictions on what is likely to unfold in the next 12 months. Journalists’ inboxes sag under the weight of unsolicited predictions for the year ahead. But separating the wheat from the chaff when it comes to forecasts of the year ahead can be tricky. Use a technology that has come into its own in 2024—generative artificial intelligence—may help. NotebookLM, Google’s note-taking and research assistant, uses its Gemini large language model to synthesize information from a vast number of sources. More importantly for journalism, which tries to avoid errors, it also cites where it gets its information from. Fast Company fed 188 reports looking ahead to 2025 from a variety of industries into NotebookLM (because the tool has a limit of 50 sources per notebook, we were forced to divide it into four separate ones), then asked the chatbot to help pick out patterns in the information. What follows is a human-summarized version of AI’s analysis. AI will remain everywhere Artificial intelligence has changed the way we live and work in the last two years, and going into 2025, many of those 188 reports are in agreement that AI will continue to have a huge impact. The technology will be more actively integrated into business operations across sectors, a significant number agreed. “AI was the big story of 2023 and 2024, and that has not changed. In fact, AI adoption will likely begin to accelerate in 2025 as energy and commodities companies gain confidence in use cases that promote optimization and innovation,” wrote Publicis Sapient, a digital consultancy, in its 2025 outlook. But AI’s use will be deployed across industries. AI is predicted to shift from a “nice-to-have” to a “must-have” tool for B2B marketers, with adoption increasing for content creation, personalization, predictive analytics, and campaign optimization,” wrote EssenceMediacom, a GroupM marketing agency, in its look ahead. Banks like Barclays believe AI will play a significant role in financial markets, with investors deploying it to try to get ahead. CB Insights believes AI-powered weather prediction could transform the insurance industry in 2025. But others sound a note of caution: in its 2025 trends analysis, Zendesk highlights the risk of so-called “shadow AI” use by employees without their employers’ permission, noting in some industries such shadow use has grown 250%, causing security risks. S&P Global suggests that AI, particularly generative AI, is driving a shift towards focusing on product and service quality improvements and revenue growth—but others worry about the need to ethically develop AI, and to not assume that its training data is obtained officially. Sustainability challenges AI adoption Many reports said 2025 will see consumers and businesses prioritize sustainability—a challenge given the ubiquitous use of AI. Nearly two-thirds of organizations are concerned about the impact of AI and machine learning projects on their energy use and carbon footprint, according to S&P Global. Juniper Research highlights the rise of sustainable fintech as a differentiator for banks, with consumers seeking out financial institutions aligned with their values around climate change and social impact. Similar trends are seen in sectors like the travel industry, where it’s forecast that travelers will pay more for products and services that support biodiversity. Overall, business process management firm WNS Global Services points out that sustainability is no longer a niche concern, but an expectation from the mainstream. Consumers expect brands to lead in addressing environmental issues. Some 61% of US consumers believe that, according to Mintel, a market analyst. Some sectors are doing better than others: biotech ingredients are becoming more common in beauty products, with companies developing in the lab ingredients that replicate nature without depleting resources. Glycoproteins derived from lobsters are gaining traction, Mintel says, offering beauty benefits while supporting marine conservation. The world will remain weird One thing that many forecasts agree on is that they can’t agree on things. Everything from economic fluctuations, geopolitical shifts and the climate crisis are likely to vex us in 2025. The landscape will be volatile, with wildly divergent economic forecasts. UK bank NatWest anticipates market volatility stemming from shifts towards fiscal activism, terminal rates, and global protectionism. Nielsen, which predicts consumer behavior, believes normalized inflation levels and lower interest rates could improve consumer confidence and get us spending… but quickly adds: “However, as we have seen in frantic shifts of the recent past, these pockets of recovery can be fragile—and could evaporate as quickly as they sprout.” There’s also a split over interest rate trends worldwide. While multiple sources anticipate rate reductions, there’s uncertainty about the speed and extent of these cuts. AXA worries social tensions and movements could be a big risk to future growth, alongside climate change and geopolitical instability, while bank Allianz cautions readers about potential “disinflation hiccups” and raises concerns about the potential of geopolitical instability and cybersecurity problems in the year ahead. But consumers are more optimistic than pessimistic, says customer experience platform Disqo, with a particular Millennials, Black consumers, and “very liberal” individuals more eager for the year ahead than others. What will China do? Chinese influence will continue to rise, the reports agreed. Foresight Factory highlighted the growing popularity of Chinese brands such as Shein and Temu internationally continuing into 2025. Chinese culture could also become more influential, with trends like the celebration of Lunar New Year and the embrace of Chinese fashion and C-beauty becoming more common outside China. But China’s potential strength abroad is countered by worries of weakness at home. Geopolitical tensions, and the likelihood of tariff wars between the US and China, could impact global trade and integration, many worried. Multiple sources, from the IMF to Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan agree that China’s economic growth is slowing. Julius Bär suggested that China has entered a “balance sheet recession”, with a highly indebted private sector focused on saving rather than spending or investing. Chinese policymakers will take action to try and stimulate the economy, the forecasts believe. “There is a clear realization that exports can no longer be a reliable growth engine given the headwinds from trade tensions and tariff risks under the new US administration,” writes HSBC. Goldman Sachs estimates that US tariffs could subtract almost 0.7 percentage points from China’s growth in 2025. Invesco also highlights recent stimulus efforts, particularly in the housing market, where mortgage rate cuts aim to encourage borrowing and spending. Gen Z rules all—but is cautious “Gen Z are the ultimate entrepreneurs,” write financial consulting firm Mercer in their HR Trends for 2025 report. Youngsters cherish financial security and companies that have a demonstrated positive impact on society. Gen Z’s hope for financial security has been dubbed “muted desire” by Italian market researchers Nextatlas, and suggests a shift in consumption patterns towards more mindful spending habits. TikTok is Gen Z’s most used app, says DCDX, a Gen Z-specific research agency—which could spell trouble if it is banned in January in the United States. One tech tool they’re cautious about? ChatGPT and its ilk. Alongside other generations Gen Z is becoming more discerning about the limitations of generative AI, according to analysts Euromonitor International. Key among Gen Z’s concerns are cautions about the potential for AI-generated misinformation and its impact on job security. The oddest predictions More niche outlooks for 2025 include Bacardi’s prediction that loud nightclubs will be supplanted by more relaxed “listening bars”, where venues prioritize good music, high-quality sound systems and a laid-back experience. Futurist Jim Carroll believes cash will “have all but disappeared” by 2025, though whether “tofu tourists” (identified as an odd trend for 2025 by Lemongrass, a travel PR agency, and describing people who seek out vegan and plant-based travel experiences) will be able to pay for their egg- and dairy-free purchases using Apple Pay or Venmo in more remote areas of the world is yet to be known. They may well dig into their wallets and bring out physical cash for ugly cakes or pickle-flavored foods, both of which are pegged by social network Pinterest as key trends for next year.

At this time of year investment banks, advertising agencies, and seemingly every other business on the planet share their predictions on what is likely to unfold in the next 12 months. Journalists’ inboxes sag under the weight of unsolicited predictions for the year ahead. But separating the wheat from the chaff when it comes to forecasts of the year ahead can be tricky. Use a technology that has come into its own in 2024—generative artificial intelligence—may help. NotebookLM, Google’s note-taking and research assistant, uses its Gemini large language model to synthesize information from a vast number of sources. More importantly for journalism, which tries to avoid errors, it also cites where it gets its information from. Fast Company fed 188 reports looking ahead to 2025 from a variety of industries into NotebookLM (because the tool has a limit of 50 sources per notebook, we were forced to divide it into four separate ones), then asked the chatbot to help pick out patterns in the information. What follows is a human-summarized version of AI’s analysis. AI will remain everywhere Artificial intelligence has changed the way we live and work in the last two years, and going into 2025, many of those 188 reports are in agreement that AI will continue to have a huge impact. The technology will be more actively integrated into business operations across sectors, a significant number agreed. “AI was the big story of 2023 and 2024, and that has not changed. In fact, AI adoption will likely begin to accelerate in 2025 as energy and commodities companies gain confidence in use cases that promote optimization and innovation,” wrote Publicis Sapient, a digital consultancy, in its 2025 outlook. But AI’s use will be deployed across industries. AI is predicted to shift from a “nice-to-have” to a “must-have” tool for B2B marketers, with adoption increasing for content creation, personalization, predictive analytics, and campaign optimization,” wrote EssenceMediacom, a GroupM marketing agency, in its look ahead. Banks like Barclays believe AI will play a significant role in financial markets, with investors deploying it to try to get ahead. CB Insights believes AI-powered weather prediction could transform the insurance industry in 2025. But others sound a note of caution: in its 2025 trends analysis, Zendesk highlights the risk of so-called “shadow AI” use by employees without their employers’ permission, noting in some industries such shadow use has grown 250%, causing security risks. S&P Global suggests that AI, particularly generative AI, is driving a shift towards focusing on product and service quality improvements and revenue growth—but others worry about the need to ethically develop AI, and to not assume that its training data is obtained officially. Sustainability challenges AI adoption Many reports said 2025 will see consumers and businesses prioritize sustainability—a challenge given the ubiquitous use of AI. Nearly two-thirds of organizations are concerned about the impact of AI and machine learning projects on their energy use and carbon footprint, according to S&P Global. Juniper Research highlights the rise of sustainable fintech as a differentiator for banks, with consumers seeking out financial institutions aligned with their values around climate change and social impact. Similar trends are seen in sectors like the travel industry, where it’s forecast that travelers will pay more for products and services that support biodiversity. Overall, business process management firm WNS Global Services points out that sustainability is no longer a niche concern, but an expectation from the mainstream. Consumers expect brands to lead in addressing environmental issues. Some 61% of US consumers believe that, according to Mintel, a market analyst. Some sectors are doing better than others: biotech ingredients are becoming more common in beauty products, with companies developing in the lab ingredients that replicate nature without depleting resources. Glycoproteins derived from lobsters are gaining traction, Mintel says, offering beauty benefits while supporting marine conservation. The world will remain weird One thing that many forecasts agree on is that they can’t agree on things. Everything from economic fluctuations, geopolitical shifts and the climate crisis are likely to vex us in 2025. The landscape will be volatile, with wildly divergent economic forecasts. UK bank NatWest anticipates market volatility stemming from shifts towards fiscal activism, terminal rates, and global protectionism. Nielsen, which predicts consumer behavior, believes normalized inflation levels and lower interest rates could improve consumer confidence and get us spending… but quickly adds: “However, as we have seen in frantic shifts of the recent past, these pockets of recovery can be fragile—and could evaporate as quickly as they sprout.” There’s also a split over interest rate trends worldwide. While multiple sources anticipate rate reductions, there’s uncertainty about the speed and extent of these cuts. AXA worries social tensions and movements could be a big risk to future growth, alongside climate change and geopolitical instability, while bank Allianz cautions readers about potential “disinflation hiccups” and raises concerns about the potential of geopolitical instability and cybersecurity problems in the year ahead. But consumers are more optimistic than pessimistic, says customer experience platform Disqo, with a particular Millennials, Black consumers, and “very liberal” individuals more eager for the year ahead than others. What will China do? Chinese influence will continue to rise, the reports agreed. Foresight Factory highlighted the growing popularity of Chinese brands such as Shein and Temu internationally continuing into 2025. Chinese culture could also become more influential, with trends like the celebration of Lunar New Year and the embrace of Chinese fashion and C-beauty becoming more common outside China. But China’s potential strength abroad is countered by worries of weakness at home. Geopolitical tensions, and the likelihood of tariff wars between the US and China, could impact global trade and integration, many worried. Multiple sources, from the IMF to Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan agree that China’s economic growth is slowing. Julius Bär suggested that China has entered a “balance sheet recession”, with a highly indebted private sector focused on saving rather than spending or investing. Chinese policymakers will take action to try and stimulate the economy, the forecasts believe. “There is a clear realization that exports can no longer be a reliable growth engine given the headwinds from trade tensions and tariff risks under the new US administration,” writes HSBC. Goldman Sachs estimates that US tariffs could subtract almost 0.7 percentage points from China’s growth in 2025. Invesco also highlights recent stimulus efforts, particularly in the housing market, where mortgage rate cuts aim to encourage borrowing and spending. Gen Z rules all—but is cautious “Gen Z are the ultimate entrepreneurs,” write financial consulting firm Mercer in their HR Trends for 2025 report. Youngsters cherish financial security and companies that have a demonstrated positive impact on society. Gen Z’s hope for financial security has been dubbed “muted desire” by Italian market researchers Nextatlas, and suggests a shift in consumption patterns towards more mindful spending habits. TikTok is Gen Z’s most used app, says DCDX, a Gen Z-specific research agency—which could spell trouble if it is banned in January in the United States. One tech tool they’re cautious about? ChatGPT and its ilk. Alongside other generations Gen Z is becoming more discerning about the limitations of generative AI, according to analysts Euromonitor International. Key among Gen Z’s concerns are cautions about the potential for AI-generated misinformation and its impact on job security. The oddest predictions More niche outlooks for 2025 include Bacardi’s prediction that loud nightclubs will be supplanted by more relaxed “listening bars”, where venues prioritize good music, high-quality sound systems and a laid-back experience. Futurist Jim Carroll believes cash will “have all but disappeared” by 2025, though whether “tofu tourists” (identified as an odd trend for 2025 by Lemongrass, a travel PR agency, and describing people who seek out vegan and plant-based travel experiences) will be able to pay for their egg- and dairy-free purchases using Apple Pay or Venmo in more remote areas of the world is yet to be known. They may well dig into their wallets and bring out physical cash for ugly cakes or pickle-flavored foods, both of which are pegged by social network Pinterest as key trends for next year.

Activism
Business
Climate

How a fantasy oil train may help the Supreme Court gut a major environmental law

Even if the railway promoters win, here's why the train won’t get built.

This story was originally published by Mother Jones and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The state of Utah has come up with its share of boondoggles over the years, but one of the more enduring is the Uinta Basin Railway. The proposed 88-mile rail line would link the oil fields of the remote Uinta Basin region of eastern Utah to national rail lines so that up to 350,000 barrels of waxy crude oil could be transported to refineries on the Gulf Coast. The railway would allow oil companies to quadruple production in the basin and would be the biggest rail infrastructure project the U.S. has seen since the 1970s. But in all likelihood, the Uinta Basin Railway will never get built. The Uinta Basin is hemmed in by the soaring peaks of the Wasatch Mountains to the west and the Uinta Mountains to the north. Running an oil train through the mountains would be both dangerous and exorbitantly expensive, especially as the world is trying to scale back the use of fossil fuels. That’s why the railway’s indefatigable promoters, including the state’s congressional delegation, will probably fail to get the train on the tracks. However, they have succeeded in one thing: providing an activist Supreme Court the opportunity to take a whack at the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, one of the nation’s oldest environmental laws. Enacted in 1970, NEPA requires federal agencies to consider the environmental and public health effects of such things as highway construction, oil drilling, and pipeline construction on public land. Big polluting industries, particularly oil and gas companies, hate NEPA for giving the public a vehicle to obstruct dirty development projects. They’ve been trying to undermine it for years, including during the last Trump administration. Last week, when the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, former Solicitor General Paul Clement channeled those corporate complaints when he told the justices that NEPA “is designed to inform government decision-making, not paralyze it.” The statute, he argued, had become a “roadblock,” obstructing the railway and other worthy infrastructure projects through excessive environmental analysis. “NEPA is adding a juicy litigation target for project opponents,” Clement told the court.   But NEPA has almost nothing to do with why the Uinta Basin Railway won’t get built. “The court is doing the dirty work for all of these industries that are interested in changing our environmental laws,” Sam Sankar, a senior vice president at Earthjustice, said in a press briefing on the case, noting that Congress already had streamlined the NEPA process last year. Earthjustice is representing environmental groups that are parties in the case. “The fact that the court took this case means that it’s just issuing policy decisions from the bench, not deciding cases.” The idea of building a railway from the Uinta Basin to refineries in Salt Lake City or elsewhere has been kicking around for more than 25 years. As I explained in 2022, the basin is home to Utah’s largest, though still modest, oil and gas fields: Locked inside the basin’s sandstone layers are anywhere between 50 and 321 billion barrels of conventional oil, plus an estimated 14 to 15 billion barrels of tar sands, the largest such reserves in the U.S. The basin also lies atop a massive geological marvel known as the Green River Formation that stretches into Colorado and Wyoming and contains an estimated 3 trillion barrels of oil shale. In 2012, the U.S. Government Accountability Office reported to Congress that if even half of the formation’s unconventional oil was recoverable, it would “be equal to the entire world’s proven oil reserves.” Wildcat speculators, big oil companies, and state officials alike have been salivating over the Uinta Basin’s rich oil deposits for years, yet they’ve never been able to fully exploit them. The oil in the basin is a waxy crude that must be heated to 115 degrees to remain liquid, a problem that ruled out an earlier attempt to build a pipeline. The Seven County Infrastructure Coalition, a quasi-governmental organization consisting of the major oil-, gas-, and coal-producing counties in Utah, has received $28 million in public funding to plan and promote the railway as a way around this obstacle. The coalition is one of the petitioners in the Supreme Court case. “We don’t have a freeway into the Uinta Basin,” Mike McKee, the coalition’s former executive director, told me back in 2022. “It’s just that we have high mountains around us, so it’s been challenging.” Of course, there is no major highway from the basin for the same reason that the railway has never been built: The current two-lane road from Salt Lake City crests a peak that’s almost 10,000 feet above sea level, which is too high for a train to go over. So the current railway plan calls for tunneling through the mountain. But going through it may be just as treacherous as going over it. Inside the unstable mountain rock are pockets of explosive methane and other gases, not all of which have been mapped. None of this deterred the Seven County coalition from notifying the federal Surface Transportation Board, or STB, in 2019 that it intended to apply for a permit for the railway. The following year, the board started the environmental review process, including taking comments from the public. In December 2021, the STB found that the railway’s transportation merits outweighed its significant environmental effects. It approved the railway, despite noting that the hazards from tunneling “could potentially cause injury or death,” both in the railway’s construction and operation. It recommended that the coalition conduct some geoengineering studies, which it had not done. Among the many issues the board failed to consider when it approved the project was the impact of the additional 18 miles of oil train cars that the railway would add to the Union Pacific line going through Colorado, including Eagle County, home to the ski town of Vail. Along with creating significant risks of wildfires, the additional trains would run within feet of the Colorado River, where the possibility of regular oil spills could threaten the drinking water for 40 million people. The deficiencies in the STB’s environmental impact statement prompted environmentalists to ask the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to review the STB decision, as did Eagle County. Read Next Can you tell if a ‘bomb train’ is coming to your town? It’s complicated. John McCracken In August 2023, the appeals court invalidated the STB’s approval of the railway. Among the many problems it found was the STB’s failure to assess “serious concerns about financial viability in determining the transportation merits of a project.” A 2018 feasibility study commissioned by the coalition itself had estimated that the railway would cost at least $5 billion to construct, need 3,000 workers, take at least 10 years to complete, and require government bond funding because the private sector had little incentive to invest in the railway.   As Justin Mikulka, a research fellow who studies the finances of energy transition at the New Consensus think tank, told me in 2022, “If there were money to be made, someone would have built this railroad 20 years ago.” The appeals court was also skeptical that the railroad had a future: “Given the record evidence identified by petitioners — including the 2018 feasibility study — there is similar reason to doubt the financial viability of the railway.” Indeed, the plan approved by the STB claims the railway construction would cost a mere $2 billion, to be paid for by a private investor. So far, however, only public money has gone into the project. The private investor, which is also one of the petitioners in the Supreme Court case, is a firm called DHIP Group. When I wrote about the railway in 2022, DHIP’s website showed involvement in only two projects: the Uinta Basin Railway and the Louisiana Plaquemines oil export terminal, which had been canceled in 2021. Today, the long-dead Louisiana project is still listed on its website, but the firm has added a New York state self-storage facility to its portfolio — a concrete box that’s a far cry from a complex, multibillion-dollar infrastructure project. DHIP’s website also touts its sponsorship of the Integrated Rail and Resources Acquisition Corporation, a new company it took public in 2021 with a $230 million IPO. But in a March 2024 SEC filing, the company disclosed that the New York Stock Exchange had threatened to delist it, because in the three years since the IPO, it has done … nothing. (The company has managed to hang on.) Environmental concerns notwithstanding, DHIP seems unlikely to come up with $2 billion to build the railway. A spokesperson for DHIP did not respond to a request for comment. Even if environmentalists had never filed suit to block it, the railway probably would have died under the weight of its own unfeasibility. Instead, the Seven County coalition appealed the decision to the Supreme Court, arguing that the appeals court had erred when it required the STB to study the local effects of oil wells and refineries that it didn’t have the authority to regulate. In July, the Supreme Court agreed to take the case. Now the court stands poised to issue a decision with much broader threats to environmental regulation by considering only one question raised by the lower court: Does Supreme Court precedent limit a NEPA analysis strictly to environmental issues that an agency regulates, or does the law allow agencies to weigh the wider impacts of a project, such as air pollution or water contamination, that may be regulated by other agencies? During oral arguments in the case, liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor expressed frustration with Clement’s suggestion that the court prevent NEPA reviews from considering impacts that were “remote in time and geography.” She suggested that such an interpretation went against the heart of the law, noting, for instance, that if a federal agency allowed a car to go to market, “it could go a thousand miles and 40 states away and blow up. That’s a reasonably foreseeable consequence that is remote in geography and time.” A federal agency, she implied, should absolutely consider such dangers. “You want absolute rules that make no sense,” Sotomayor told Clement. Sotomayor seemed to be alone, however, in her defense of NEPA, and the majority of the other seven justices seemed inclined to require at least some limits to the statute. (Justice Neil Gorsuch recused himself from the case because his former patron, Denver-based billionaire Philip Anschutz, had a potential financial interest in the outcome of the case. His oil and gas company, Anschutz Exploration Corporation, has federal drilling leases in Utah and elsewhere and also filed an amicus brief in the case.) While the justices seemed inclined to hamstring NEPA, such a ruling would be a hollow victory for the Utah railway promoters that brought the case. When the appeals court voided the STB decision approving the railway, it cited at least six other reasons it was unlawful beyond the NEPA issue. None of those will be affected by a Supreme Court decision in the Seven County coalition case. The STB permit will still be void, and the oil train will not get out of the station. There will be winners in the case, however, most likely the big fossil fuel and other companies whose operations would benefit from less environmental scrutiny, should the court issue a decision reining in NEPA. For instance, the case could lead the court to strictly limit the extent of environmental harms that must be considered in future infrastructure projects, meaning that the public would have a much harder time forcing the government to consider the health and environmental effects of oil and gas wells and pipelines before approving them. “This case is bigger than the Uinta Basin Railway,” Earthjustice’s Sankar said. “The fossil fuel industry and its allies are making radical arguments that would blind the public to obvious health consequences of government decisions.” The court will issue a decision by June next year. This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How a fantasy oil train may help the Supreme Court gut a major environmental law on Dec 22, 2024.

Activism
Climate
Energy

Texas regulators shelve an electricity market reform proposal they say does too little to shore up grid

The Public Utility Commission found that the performance credit mechanism, a financial tool the Legislature capped at $1 billion, would only marginally improve reliability of the state power grid.

Sign up for The Brief, The Texas Tribune’s daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news. The Public Utility Commission on Thursday shelved the performance credit mechanism, a controversial idea that was designed to bring more power onto the state grid and increase its reliability. “I don’t believe that the PCM, as currently designed, will provide the reliability benefits needed in the ERCOT market,” PUC Chair Thomas Gleeson wrote in a Dec. 18 memo that the rest of the commission endorsed on Thursday. The performance credit mechanism represented a complex change to the way Texas’ electricity market works. The idea would have required electricity providers — the companies, co-ops and municipal utilities that sell power to people — to pay more to generators that committed to having electricity available when grid conditions get tight. Electricity providers then could have passed those extra costs onto consumers. The goal was to incentivize companies to build more of what are known as dispatchable power facilities. Dispatchable power sources, such as natural gas, nuclear and coal-fired plants, can turn on any time and fill in the gaps in supply when demand for power is high — unlike renewable sources that depend on sun and wind. Amid concerns that the tool would lead to skyrocketing electricity bills without guaranteeing greater reliability, the Legislature last year imposed a $1 billion cap on how much it could cost consumers. That cap, according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages the state grid, was the parameter that “most significantly limits the effectiveness of the PCM.” ERCOT and an independent market monitor found this year that with the $1 billion limit, the proposal would have only minimally improved the grid’s reliability, estimating that it would lead to an extra 780 megawatts of generation — far short of the 10,000 megawatts needed to meet the state’s reliability standard. The most important Texas news,sent weekday mornings. A coalition of consumer advocates, oil and gas lobbyists and environmental activists had demanded the cost limit to protect consumers from higher electricity bills. Companies that operate gas-fueled power plants had opposed a cap, saying it would reduce or kill the effectiveness of the credits. The PUC on Thursday pointed to other mechanisms that commissioners said would do more to increase reliability. “While reconsideration of the PCM may be appropriate in the future,” Gleeson wrote in his memo, “at this point I believe our collective resources are best directed toward implementing other market design initiatives.” Those measures include tools to streamline how ERCOT procures power and a new ancillary services program that can offer power to smooth out uncertainty on the grid. In August, the PUC adopted a grid reliability standard that said a major power outage due to inadequate power supply could take place no more than once every decade on average; any outage must last less than 12 hours; and the amount of power lost during any hour of an outage could not exceed the level that could be safely rotated through rolling blackouts. Beginning in 2026, ERCOT must conduct an assessment every three years of whether the system is meeting the reliability standard — an opportunity, the PUC said, to evaluate the effects of changes implemented by the agency and the Legislature since Winter Storm Uri in 2021 and to consider any other measures that may be needed.

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