This past week a friend of mine who is a Civil Engineer traveled with his wife to Washington D.C. for a climate change conference. He chose to go to this conference to fulfill a City of El Paso requirement for doing new urbanism projects. Fortunately for them, they enjoy visiting D.C. and Alexandria, VA.
The conference was supposed to be focused on climate change and new urbanism. Fine and dandy. The problem was that it became a pretext for pontificating about a number of what can be considered "left-wing" issues: diversity, racial justice, I-Hate-Trump and so forth. Agree or disagree with the political positions the panelists took, they strayed from the purpose of the meeting. There was no presentation of the science of climate change, the data, the measurements, the predictions, etc. Bottom line: it was a farce.
My friend is not anti-environmental. He cares but challenges whether political solutions can ever match market place economics when it comes to addressing environmental problems.
As an environmentalist (I'm not a scientist - I've just been an activist) I agree that we should stick to the facts, stick to the science. Certainly there are a number of social and political problems that ought to be addressed and there will always be a number of opinions on how we should deal with those problems. However, mixing our political opinions with science is just not scientific. It turns a pursuit for the truth into a tool for demagogues. It becomes opinion and not a theoretical position based on our observations and measurements.
Environmentalism would be better served by sticking to the science.
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I believe your civil engineer friend may not be aware that a few years ago the city dropped their requirement that had been instituted by Mathew McElroy for engineers and architects to obtain and maintain certification as a CNU. I think his attendance at the seminar was for nothing. El Paso was the only city in the US with such a requirement and it was an embarrassment and absurdity to have forced design professionals with PE or AIA certifications to have obtained that meaningless CNU certification. Mathew had also forced a large number of city employees to obtain the CNU certification. The CNU entity (the Congress for New Urbanism) is a trade group established by and for the benefit of new urbanist consultants.
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