WHAT’S SO BAD ABOUT GOODS?

Poetry and consumption are the most flattering of diseases. ~ William Shenstone 

 How’s your holiday shopping coming along? Beyond the holidays, have you been buying more goods or services than in the past? As I’ll discuss, some folks are concerned we consumers have been buying too many goods and not enough services. Goods are bad, services are better. The giant consumer segment of our economy is not in balance.

Even Pope Francis is concerned about consumption. He ended his visit to Greece several weeks ago by encouraging its young people to “follow your dreams and not be tempted by the consumerist ‘sirens’ of today that promise easy pleasures.” Those sirens are blowing a different tune of late.

Recently, polls indicate how we have felt increasingly uneasy about the economy. Family finances are in fairly decent shape for most people, due in part to the exceptional series of Covid-related government “economic impact payments” they’ve received since April 2020. The federal government has sent 478 million direct-cash payments to qualified recipients. Ninety-three percent (93%) of Americans have received these outlays.

Government-provided pandemic assistance extended to businesses as well as people. Government-funded, Covid-related business support was $753.8 billion in 2020, principally through the Paycheck Protection Program and the Restaurant Revitalization Fund.

Beginning in July, eligible parents have additionally received five (5) monthly child tax credit assistance checks. Remarkably, this aid – totaling about $90 billion (B) – has quickly reduced the national poverty rate by nearly 50%, compared to three (3) years ago.

Largely because of these support programs, 64% of respondents believed their personal finances were good in a recent poll, but incongruently only 35% described the national economy as good. Stored-up household savings from all these compensations may total $2 trillion (T), which is an impressively large sum. But all is not well.

According to insistent media proclamations by economic wizzes, we consumers are buying too many goods and not enough services with these unspent funds. I find these declarations a bit puzzling, as I’ll mention.

After a very long slumber, inflation has reared its costly head across the economy with consumer demand outstripping available supply. In November, the Consumer Price Index (CPI) increased 6.8%, the largest 12-month increase since June 1982.

Even the Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell finally succumbed to this economic reality by stating last week he would no longer call inflation “transitory.” He didn’t mention what he would be calling inflation now. I’d suggest “unfortunately augmented.” The CPI’s energy index rose a whopping 33.3% over the last 12 months, the food index increased 6.1%, which comes as no surprise to those of us who frequent gas stations and grocery stores.

Because of the Great Resignation, where workers are quitting their jobs in unexpectedly large numbers, businesses are offering higher wages and salaries to entice workers back. Over the past year, wages have increased 4.2%, almost a 50% rise compared to pre-Covid times.

How long will these inflationary trends last? No one knows, despite erudite claims to the contrary. What the Fed is going to do about this continuing, augmented inflation was partially revealed on December 15 when the Fed stated it would further reduce its expansionary policies for the economy “in light of inflation developments.” This means the Fed will likely increase interest rates several times next year. How much will the markets shudder at this key change in monetary policy? On Friday December 17, the S&P500 Index had lost just 1.89%, perhaps because the market’s expectations for a policy change have already been built into stock values.

The current, augmented level of inflation is due to three (3) factors: consumers’ growing demand for goods and services (especially goods), the fragility of some supply-chains to provide more goods and recently-elevated inflationary expectations.

This last item is the most problematic. Policy-makers have next to no control over how or why consumers hold such expectations or how they can influence them, short of implementing broad, contractionary economic policies. Such a policy reversal will not happen by Congress, which with the president dictates fiscal policy. The Dems would resist such policies as exceptionally fraught politically.

Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer has no interest in halting his troops from passing the now-reduced, but still extensive $1.85T Build Back Better (BBB) Act. That’s even though several months of full-court-press worthy efforts by the president and other Dems has yet to convince Sen. Manchin to put his name in the BBB’s yea column. The senator publicly stated on Dec. 19 he could not support the legislation, a change in the usual behind-closed-doors negotiations with the White House. Despite the media hurrah, I expect the negotiating isn’t dead yet, a bit like we saw for a while in Monty Python’s Life of Brian.

It’s ironic that the Dems have argued the far-reaching BBB expenditures will actually reduce inflation. A large upsurge in government spending, like the BBB Act, spreads more money throughout the economy, which raises business and consumer demand, and likely prices. Thus, federal economic policy to reduce inflation will be solely the Fed’s responsibility through its monetary policy mechanisms.

But back to goods. Personal consumption expenditures (PCE) have long been the nation’s single largest type of spending. Consumer purchases account for about 70% of our GDP. In contrast, government expenditures are just 17% of GDP, despite our being saturated with news of trillion-dollar legislative efforts. This is as true currently as it was a decade ago.

Our consumer purchases are placed into two (2) principal categories, goods expenditures and services expenditures. About 60% of our PCE are for services (everything from haircuts and restaurant meals to streaming service fees) and around 40% for goods (including furniture, jewelry, gasoline, rent and college tuition). These proportions haven’t changed much at all during the last year, as shown in the table.

Goods and Services Sectors Expenditures and Employment

Economic Sector	2021Q3	2020Q3	2011
Personal Goods expenditures (trillions $)	$5.524 (40.3%)*	$5.159 (40.2%)*	$3.331 (35.3%)*
Goods employment (millions of workers)	N.A.	20.022 (12.8%)**	18.244 (11.9%)**
Personal Services expenditures (trillions $)	$8.366 (61.0%)*	$7.815 (61.0%)*	$6.102 (64.7%)*
Services employment (millions of workers)	N.A.	122.774 (74.7%)**	114.652 (74.6%)**

*Percent of personal consumption expenditures (PCE). **Percent of total labor force. 

Personal consumer goods purchases have slightly increased during the past year, by $365B, which is a lot of money representing a 6.6% overall increase. Yet it’s only a one-tenth of one percent increase, as a proportion of PCE. From 2020Q3 to this year, services purchases have also increased, by $551B, a 6.6% increase from last year; but with no proportional change. During the last decade, as a proportion of PCE, goods expenditures have fallen by 5% relative to services. These diminutive changes have the wizzes concerned.

Consumers’ minor shift to purchasing goods recently has risen relative to services in no small part because of the pandemic’s restrictions. But the shift to goods expenditures is a very modest change, seemingly not worthy of much attention. However, I found the likely reason for all the interest.

The wizzes’ focus may not be on changes in expenditures, but on employment levels, also shown in the table. Our economy’s services sector employs a disproportionately larger number of people, relative to the goods sector. In 2020Q3 (latest year for data), 122.8 million people were employed in the services sector, far more than the 20 million in the goods sector. Services employment is 6x larger than the goods industries, and accounts for almost 75% of our total labor force. Intriguingly, services sector labor productivity (measured by output per employee) is much lower, just 45.3%, than the goods sector.

During the last 12 months, workers’ wages and salaries have risen higher than any time in more than 15 years. These increases reflect the labor market’s growing tightness. Goods-producing workers’ wages and salaries increased 3.5% on an annual basis. Service-providing workers’ wages and salaries increased 4.3% during the same period, among the highest of any sector.

During the pandemic, six (6) of the 13 services sector sub-industries, accounting for 74% of the sector’s total employment, have lost 2.8M employees as of November. The largest losses have been in leisure and hospitality – 90,000 restaurants have closed permanently during Covid – and government, especially local governments.

Despite the ever-lowering official unemployment rate, now 4.2%, the services sector’s loss of employees is a serious personal and  macroeconomic problem. Our low unemployment rate masks the ever-increasing number of workers who have dropped-out of the labor market, are no longer actively looking for jobs, and thus technically are not “unemployed.”

Santa’s bag filled with more goods and less services.

The rise of Omicron will only intensify simultaneous inflationary prices and dwindling labor availability. Covid keeps making services, like eating in restaurants and a host of other shared, public activities riskier. Even Santa’s becoming concerned. His bag of goodies will likely need to be enlarged, making his travels down chimneys that much more challenging. 

PRICE RISES AND TIME SLIPPING

You know the nearer your destination, the more you're slip slidin' away. ~ Paul Simon   

Is it time to travel? Seems so. Many more people have travelled to eat green bean casserole with distant relatives and friends. AAA expected more than 53 million people will travel during this Thanksgiving holiday, the highest single-year increase since 2005. We’re clearly more on the move than last year.

Perhaps high-flying sojourners are attempting to escape increasingly tumultuous, rising prices in their localities. The media and others have been proclaiming inflation as a big, but non-transitory issue facing President Biden.

Indeed, prices facing consumers are elevating. The year-over-year Consumer Price Index (CPI) for October increased 6.2%, the highest in 30 years. Gasoline prices rose 49.6%, the second-highest increase of any CPI item. Meats, poultry, fish, and eggs’ prices increased 11.9%, that you’ve already witnessed at your grocery’s check-out. Amazon’s prices on more than 20,000 popular items increased 7.5% in October from a year ago.

Are these price surges connected with the president’s increasingly dire poll numbers? Maybe, although it’s by no means conclusive. Time may tell.

Unfortunately, every president including Mr. Biden has few direct means of quickly controlling rising prices of final goods and services. President Biden’s statements that his newly-signed $1.2T of infrastructure expenditures will reduce inflation may be true ultimately, but only after all the bridges, highways, power lines and Amtrak have been revitalized eight years from now. Large-scale infrastructure projects take considerable time to start, and a long time to be completed. Needed infrastructure improvements will not reduce inflation between now and the mid-term elections.

We economists maintain, with fingers crossed behind our backs, that prices are simply a consequence of how market supply and market demand are interacting. When consumer demand increases more than supply, as seems to be happening for a while, prices will rise, as they have been. Alas, economic models are far less definitive about the duration of upward price pressures.

Even as the Federal Reserve and the president maintain such price increases are merely “transitory,” monthly consumer price increases have averaged 8% since April. October’s annualized monthly increase is 10.8%. No wonder inflation is becoming a beyond-transitory issue for the administration.

To show that he’s doing something, the president has ordered that 50 million barrels be sold from the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve, to increase the domestic supply of oil products. He also requested that OPEC increase its production. Nice try Joe, but such efforts at best may have some momentary political benefit, but no substantive market effect for lowering gas prices or inflationary pressures. OPEC predictably declined his request. Fifty million barrels represents just 2 ½ days of total US oil consumption; and a mere 8% of the Reserve (that at some point will need to be replaced at likely higher-per-barrel prices).  

Interestingly, although transportation expenditures’ costs rose 4.5% over the past year, airline fares taxied downward at 4.6%. Maybe these declines, in addition to the public’s strong, pent-up desires to share turkey and tofurkey, spurred the rush into cramped airplane seats.

Nevertheless, a small number of travelers aren’t flying or driving. Nope, they’re following time-slips.

If you aren’t familiar with time-slips, they refer to fleeting, temporal anomalies experienced by individuals. A sort of accidental, serendipitous time travel. Such time crossings are not extended adventures such as Mark Twain described in his pioneering 1889 time-travel novel, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. I enjoyed reading this book last year.

Twain’s popular book portrays Yankee engineer Hank Morgan as he somehow finds himself, after being hit on his head, transported from late 19th-century New England into non-new England during the reign of King Arthur in the 6th-century. The original frontispiece from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is shown below, where a mounted, armored knight with a lance is charging Mr. Morgan up a tree. It describes the considerable period and many adventures that Mr. Morgan experienced in Camelot. His ventures allowed Mark Twain to comment on then-contemporary American society and as well as parody the idea of chivalry and the legend of King Arthur’s Camelot.

Source: Wikipedia

Time travel didn’t stop in the late 1800s. Modern tales of people who have experienced transitory time-slips (time-slippers?) describe them as short excursions back in time at the spot where the person happens to be right before the slippage. Some time-slippers travel far rearward in history, others not so far.

Buckle up for the several time-slip accounts. In July 1996, Frank, an off-duty policeman, walked down a street in central Liverpool, Merseyside, England to shop at Dillon’s Bookshop. As he walked, he noticed the street was now cobbled. It hadn’t been before he started; pedestrians were now wearing clothes appropriate for 40 or so years prior, not 1996 contemporary. He crossed the cobbled street and noticed instead of Dillon’s was a store named Cripps, selling handbags and women’s shoes. Frank saw a woman dressed in 1990s clothes enter Cripps looking perplexed. Suddenly, the whole scene revered back to 1996 and the cobblestones and Cripps disappeared. Frank asked the woman if she’d seen the same strange, time-warped things; she said yes. Frank later found out that a women’s haberdashery called Cripps operated on the Dillon’s bookstore site in the 1950s.

Another time-slipper vividly saw medieval boats sailing on a British river next to the ancient castle he was visiting in Wales, and then suddenly the boats vanished as he returned to the present-day. Two young women were walking up a densely-wooded local hill in northwest England during the summer on a trail they had hiked on many times before. On this hike they saw for the first time an old-fashioned, rough-stone cottage amid the trees that reminded them of a dwelling “from the Middle Ages.” There was smoke wafting out of the chimney and the door began to open as they came closer. They promptly fled down the hill and haven’t seen the ancient cottage ever again on this trail.

These time-slip recountings offer a however brief alternative to our usual linear sense of time. Also, they perhaps bear the idea that time is more than a one-way throughfare to the hereafter.

Perhaps President Biden would wish to time-slip himself back to 1965, when inflation was a trifling 1.6%. And when the Dems enjoyed impressively formidable control of both the House and Senate after Lyndon Johnson’s giant victory over Barry Goldwater. The Dems margin in the 1965 House was +155 representatives; in the Senate it was a 36-senator, filibuster-proof majority margin. Those were the days, sort of.

Here’s to slipping through time as easily and interestingly as possible.

 

 

CALENDARS, JUST IN THE NICK OF TIME

 I’ve been on a calendar, but I’ve never been on time. ~ Marilyn Monroe

Today’s date is November 13, 2021, as well as Alban 22, 1400, October 31, 2021 and 2459532.18830. I’ll explain each of these “today’s” dates shortly. There’s a long, fascinating history behind this date, and for that matter, any calendar date.

Several noteworthy events have occurred on November 13, including:

1775 - During the American Revolution, US forces captured Montreal.

1956 - The US Supreme Court struck down laws calling for racial segregation on public buses.

1971 - The US spacecraft Mariner 9 became the first spacecraft to orbit another planet, Mars.

1995 - Greg Maddox of the Atlanta Braves became the first major league pitcher to win four consecutive Cy Young Awards.

Why do we know when these events happened? Because of calendars. A calendar is a methodical ordering of days, months and years. Many diverse calendars, using different day-ordering systems, have been and are still being used. Calendar cognoscenti say there are about 40 different calendars now being utilized around the globe. Wikipedia displays an impressive 86 calendars in its list.

The word “calendar” is derived from calendae, the Roman designation for the first day of the month, when debts were due to be paid. I was told the “…ar” ending in the word calendar, which is much rarer than the usual “…er” ending syllable, notes a Sumerian dialect as its prime source.

For the past 439 years, virtually all of us have been using the Gregorian calendar as a basis for defining our day-to-day lives through the years. Ever since homo sapiens gained some sense of awareness of their larger surroundings – at least one hundred thousand years ago, perhaps much longer ago – they noted the daily cycle of each day, the roughly monthly cycle of the moon (29.53 days) and earth’s yearly cycle around the sun (365.242190 days in 2021).

The passage of the moon and the sun have always been the most prominent, regular, repeated events useful for keeping track of time. Virtually every human calendar uses some combination of lunar or solar periodicity, which is why many calendars are called lunisolar, whose date indicates both the moon phase and the time of the solar year.

Subsequent to the initial development of written records in the Near East, the first documented calendars are Bronze Age Sumerian/Babylonian calendars from 12,000 years ago. These calendars’ years began during the spring season with each of their lunar months (starting with a setting, new crescent moon), plus an intercalary “leap month” that could be inserted by decree. The intercalary period served to inflate the year’s number of days, allowing the annual calendar to follow the seasons. Such adjustments were important because the shorter 12 lunar months add up to almost 11 fewer annual sidereal days.

The Babylonian calendar was followed by Zoroastrian and Persian ones. Evidence of Persian calendars has been found from the second millennium BCE. Persian calendars have been altered many times for a variety of religious and administrative motivations. The calendars’ twelve 30-day months were each named for festivals or activities during the year. An intercalary phase was added periodically to harmonize the calendar with the seasons.

The 11th-century Persian intellect Omar Khayyam – a true Renaissance man, several centuries or so before its time in Italy – lay the formulation and structure for one of the most accurate, ancient calendars. In 1079, Khayyam made astronomical observations and announced a new calendar whose year-length was measured as 365.242198 days. This 942-year-old estimate represents astounding accuracy, fully comparable to modern calculations. Today’s date is Alban 22, 1400 in the Persian calendar.

The Persian year usually begins within a day of the northern vernal equinox, March 20-21 in the Gregorian calendar. The Persian calendar was one of the first to be based on the solar year, rather than a lunar or lunisolar approach. That’s consistent with the sun’s being a divine and religious symbol in Persian culture.

The Hindu calendar has been guiding people on the Indian continent probably since 1700 BCE and continues to be used by Hindus around the world to determine festival dates. The ancient Hindu calendar ordering system is also seen the Babylonian calendar, as well as the Hebrew and Chinese calendars.

The Hindu system differs from the Gregorian calendar. Unlike the initial Gregorian calendar, which added days to several lunar months to synchronize lunar cycles and the sidereal year, the Hindu calendar maintains every lunar month, and inserts a full-month intercalary period every 32–33 months. This ensures that festivals and agriculture-related rituals that are spread throughout the year occur during the appropriate season. An elegant Hindu calendar from 1871 is shown below.

 

Hindu calendar

The first Roman calendars also followed lunar month cycles. Each month had several principal days, including the first day (the kalends) and a day a bit before the middle of the month (the ides). Thus, these calendars had more ides beyond just March. For centuries, the Romans had eight-day weeks, two millennia before the Beatles’ song.^[1] It wasn’t until 321 CE that Emperor Constantine eventually established a seven-day week in the Roman calendar.

Interestingly, the Babylonians were astute observers of the skies, and it is largely thanks to them that Constantine changed the week’s length. The reason the Babylonians first adopted seven days was they saw seven celestial bodies that were deemed preeminent — the sun, the moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. The chart below shows how each of the seven weekdays were named.

Weekday	Named after
Sunday	the celestial body, Sun.
Monday	the celestial body, Moon.
Tuesday	Tiu, the Anglo-Saxon god of war. The Romans named their third day of the week after Mars, their god of war. That is why romantic languages like Spanish, French and Italian all have similar names for Tuesday: martes, mardi, and martedi.
Wednesday	Woden, the Norse god of war.
Thursday	Thor, the Norse god of thunder and lightning.
Friday	Frigg, the wife of Woden, representing love and beauty.
Saturday	Saturn, the Roman god of agriculture.

 Way before Constantine, Julius Caesar reformed the Empire’s existing calendar in 45 BCE with help from Greek mathematicians. This new calendar, the Julian calendar, became a solar calendar. Today’s Julian calendar date is Oct. 31, 2021, Halloween (again)!

Two changes were made. Simply put, the first modification realigned the Julian calendar year to be consistent with a solar year and became 365 days long. This was done by inflating the number of days in several old Roman months. Second, a leap day was added to February every four years, making average Julian year-length, 365.25 days. And eventually, the seventh month turned into July (after Julius Caesar) followed by August (after Caesar Augustus).

The Julian calendar became the principal calendar in the Roman Empire and subsequently in most of the Western world for more than 1,600 years.

However, the Roman Catholic Church noticed that the Julian system had caused the calendar to drift relative to the spring and fall equinoxes. This was important because the Julian calendar’s excess leap days caused the northern hemisphere’s spring equinox to happen considerably before March 20 or 21 and thus affected the church’s crucial spring celebration, the lunar-based Easter Sunday mass^[2].

With such motivation, Pope Gregory XIII proclaimed in 1582 a minor but crucial calendar modification which reduced the average length of the Julian year from 365.25 days to 365.2425 days. The Gregorian calendar thus more closely approximates the 365.242190-day solar year that it takes the Earth to make one revolution around the Sun.

The Gregorian calendar change does this by spacing leap years beyond the Julian method of simply saying a leap year is one that is exactly divisible by four. Gregorian leap years include the Julian method, but go beyond it. The further delineation for Gregorian leap-years is for years which are exactly divisible by 100, like 2000 was. These years are only a leap year if they are exactly divisible by 400. Thus, the century year that will begin on Friday, Jan. 1, 2100 is not a Gregorian leap year nor was 1900. But 2000 was and 2400 will be. Consequently, the Gregorian calendar corrected the Julian calendar's wandering away from the solar year and has been with us on our spinning globe ever since 1582.

Another calendar mechanism is the Julian day. No, it’s not an update of the ancient Julian calendar. The Julian day format, also called the ordinal format, is yyyyddd (first four digits signify the year, the next three refer to the numeric day of the year). Today’s Julian day date is thus 2021313. The format is used in computer programming and by the military.

Confusingly, there is also a Julian Date Number (JDN) used by astronomers, other skyward-looking scientists and in software. It is the strangest calendar mechanism I found. This date is today’s contiguous number of days, and fractions of days, since the beginning of the Julian Period, which is defined at noon Universal Time on Jan. 1, 4713 BCE. Really? Today’s JDN, at 08:30 PST (drum-roll please) is 2459532.18830, which is a whole lot of days and digits.

Why Jan. 1, 4713 BCE? Because Joseph Scaliger devised this calendar mechanism in 1583, one year after the Gregorian calendar began. And he chose the Julian Period to begin on the date when the Julian calendar, the Lunar calendar and the Roman Tax calendar all coincided – Jan. 1, 4713 BCE. Also, this date apparently is the most recent day in which the year began on a Sunday with a full moon.

No matter how you choose to label today, I hope it’s a good date for you.

 

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[1] The Beatles’ Eight Days a Week was recorded in 1964: “Hold me, love me, hold me, love me, I ain't got nothing but love, babe, eight days a week.”

[2] The date of Roman Catholic Easter is the Sunday on or after the first full moon following the spring equinox. 

GETTING TO #2D5A27

The future will be green or not at all. ~ Bob Brown  

Getting to #2d5a27 refers to the web color for leaf green that is the natural green color I associate with net-zero atmospheric emissions from greenhouse gases (GHG).

Leaf green - #2d5a27 - net zero emissions

 This getting to a leaf green/net-zero emission future is contrasted with our present non-green environmental status, that I characterize charitably as dull olive green, web color #bab86c. Leaf green will be center stage at the UN’s COP26 climate summit that begins tomorrow in rainy Glasgow, Scotland.

The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has 197 members who are each a “Party” to its annual conference.[1] The upcoming 26th Conference of Parties (COP) will gauge the Parties’ progress in dealing with climate change. This COP, like every previous one, has been pronounced “vital for Earth’s future.”

COP26 will highlight the status of many nations’ getting-to-zero pronouncements. Special attention will be paid to President Biden because his initial plans for getting to zero got hijacked last week in West Virginia.

The quasi-belligerent Dems moderate and Prog caucuses (who have been called the “never-enough caucus” by their Dem critics) are continuing to squabble about the final climate deal. If he’s lucky, I expect the president’s initial speech before the COP26 World Leaders Summit on Monday won’t be finalized until one minute before he actually addresses the delegates.

Long ago (meaning 7 days ago), his original plan was to spend $619 trillion (T) on environmental/climate benefits as part of his multi-faceted $3.5T American Family Plan (AFP). Adding to the already-sizeable public confusion, the AFP has now been relabeled the Build Back Better (BBB) Plan. This hefty sum represented about 17% of total AFP expenditures. Those spending numbers are now historical dust. They remain huge, but have considerably shrunk.

The final BBB budget will likely end up at about $1.75T. Ages ago, the Dems unfortunately choose to publicly reference their “infrastructure” programs by their Georges (their dollar value). Dollars are always important, but $1,750,000,000,000 of them far surpasses anyone’s sense of value; it just seems gargantuan.

The shrunken BBB/AFP will now provide $555B for environmental climate change restoration. Environmental advocates should count themselves as clear winners. This sum represents the single largest support for environmental benefit that the US government has ever proffered.

If this funding level holds, it represents a disproportionately large fraction (32%) of the latest, smaller BBB budget, almost doubling the environmental programs’ relative backing. Sure, some environmental activists are already complaining about the lost funding. That’s their job, I guess. But can’t they see their glass is fuller than anyone else's? It represents a gigantic six (6) times as much as the entire FY2021 EPA budget, assuming the $555B gets spent evenly across the next 10 years.

Activists mentioned that the lower environmental budget is unlikely to allow the nation to meet the president’s goal of cutting GHG emissions in half by 2030. I take such statements as probably true, but mainly offered as a place-marker for demanding additional funds in the future.

The most important piece in these climate expenditures is the Renewable Energy Tax Credits. These credits are expected to have far more beneficial climate effects than the other pieces, including the Clean Electricity Performance Program that Sen. Manchin specifically denigrated, and thus bit the fiscal dust.

The US vows to get roughly halfway to net zero by 2030 (is that 0.5-to-zero?), which seems optimistic given what’s happened so far with other GHG emission reduction efforts. Getting halfway to zero in just nine (9) years will require herculean efforts in virtually every sector of our economy and every neighborhood. These efforts will directly affect everyone’s lives. Given the decidedly non-warp speed of government, don’t hold your breath for anything happening immediately.

The US won’t be alone in confronting such trials. Every COP26 Party will face abundant ordeals in getting to net zero emissions. Nations and subnational government entities have selected various years for achieving full or partial zero net emissions. Zero emissions dates range from 2030 to 2050, the target zero-year for the largest number of nations, including the US. The 2050 date is the zero year for the IPCC’s directive to keep global temperature rises below 1.5°C relative to pre-industrial era levels. The Chinese have belatedly stated they will tardily get to zero by 2060. Better late than never? Perhaps, because China has been the world’s largest CO2 polluter since 2006. India, the world's 3rd largest carbon emitter, has yet to update its Paris emissions-reduction pledge. 

Unsurprisingly, many environmentalists believe our world is already far behind schedule in getting to zero. The annual UN Emissions Gap Report, released last week, stated we need to cut emissions seven times faster than we  already have to attain the 2015 Paris Agreement’s allegedly-binding climate goals.

This report stressed that the dozens of countries that have pledged to reach zero emissions by 2050 is reassuring and could certainly limit future warming. However, many of those long-term, macro-level plans remain “vague” and “incomplete.” In addition, these plans fail to itemize near-term actions that would put nations on a track to realistically achieve the promised, longer-term goals.

More detailed plans are certainly needed, but politicians fear their public reception. More specific plans will require confronting and resolving torturous trade-offs. Transitioning to a leaf green future will make or break whether these political plans gain public support and success.

This is why politicians simply want to go on record saying, “I’m in favor of saving the Earth by achieving net zero emissions by year X,” with that date futuristic enough so they’ll be comfortably retired by year X, out of the public’s eyes.

Getting to leaf green zero emissions will be a disruptive, divisive and costly process. Fundamentally, it means ending the fossil-fuel era that began more than 250 years ago during the Industrial Revolution. Getting to net zero emissions will suffer from the abiding problem of archetypal technologic policy-making. Specifically, offering everyone far-off future rewards (leaf green grandeur in 2050), in return for soon paying sizeable expenditures with socially-uneven costs. It’s naïve to assume everybody will accede to such government plans and mandates; their social discount rates aren’t low enough. Many Dems, with nary a Repub, thus are warily proclaiming a net-zero emissions victory by 2050.

NOAA announced in June that atmospheric CO2 concentration has reached its highest level ever, 419 ppm. Corroborating this finding, the International Energy Agency (IAE) predicts that CO2 emissions will swell 4.8% in 2021, as energy-related demand rebounds across our planet.

Numerous non-leaf green legacy technologies will have to be discarded, soon. Regrettably, the IEA has shown many essential technologies for getting to decarbonization – expanded electrification, large-scale energy storage, carbon capture, biomass and low-carbon hydrogen fuels – are currently nowhere near market-ready. Thus, there is a stark divide between the politicians’ stated climate goals and the availability of proven, reliable, cost-effective technologies to actually realize these needed goals.

In addition to very rapid technological change, changes in people’s behavioral choices will be required to achieve getting-to-zero goals. Understandably, such needed behavioral modifications pointedly have not been meaningfully discussed.

California has been on the leading edge of decarbonization policy. The Golden State has now banned the sale of internal-combustion engine (ICE) cars by 2035[2] as well as the use of ICE lawn mowers and leaf blowers. [I have a mature, hand-push rotary lawn mower for a cut-rate price, in case you’re interested.]

Public officials have failed to state that getting-to-zero will involve changing every citizen’s life in small and not-so-small ways. For example, politicians are assuming that 14 years from now (2035) every adult in California and beyond will eagerly buy only a new electric vehicle for their personal transport and a new heat pump (or hydrogen furnace) for their home’s space conditioning. Electric vehicles, including plug-in hybrids, now account for 1.8% of 2020 US auto sales; 4.9% of households have chosen to purchase a heat pump for their heating-cooling and/or water heating.

The BBB/AFC programs’ legislation, now 1,684 pages long and counting, is being written hurriedly, with much midnight oil being proverbially burned. This legislation has been subject to vigorous lobbying efforts, but few public committee meetings. The Biden administration has been desperately seeking new means to control GHG emissions and pay for their curtailment that are copesetic with Sens. Mansema. Cooler heads prevailed when the Dems wisely torpedoed a brief resurrection of Sen. Warren’s wealth tax as a funding mechanism.

One observer stated that there’s no dimension of life that will be untouched by California’s and other regions' decarbonization agendas. Recent laws that Governor Newsom has signed, and President Biden hopes to sign, in this realm contain acres of small print that focus on GHG emission reductions as well as a plethora of unintended consequences. Let’s hope citizens believe in these efforts’ value and support them 373 days from now.

Here’s to achieving a leaf-green future as coolly as possible.

 

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[1] The UNFCCC includes all UN member states, plus the UN observer State of Palestine, UN non-member states Niue and the Cook Islands in the South Pacific Ocean and the supranational European Union. In addition, the Holy See is an observer state. Will the Pope bless this COP’s efforts? Hopefully.

[2] In 2020, California sold 1.64 million light-duty vehicles, the largest of any state; including 8.1% plug-in EVs, which includes EV hybrids as well as solely battery-powered EVs. 

BUILDING BACK BETTER DREAMS

Striving to better, oft we mar what’s well. ~ William Shakespeare (King Lear) 

The Dems’ much-vaunted and massively comprehensive “Build Back Better” (BBB) agenda was first discussed by Joe Biden before his inauguration last January. Since then, it has evolved on a regular basis. The BBB includes three major pieces: first, the covid-19 relief American Rescue Plan (ARP) with a $1.9 trillion (T) budget that Congress passed via reconciliation in March. Second, the American Jobs Plan (AJP); and third, the American Families Plan (AFP).

I liken the Dems’ process for passing the Build Back Better legislation to constructing a 271-piece jigsaw puzzle, filled with oddly, sometimes changing shaped pieces. There are now 220 Dems in the House and 50 in the Senate, plus the vital, tie-breaking Dem VP, Kamala Harris piece in the Senate, totaling 271. The Dems’ have been wrestling for months among themselves to design and secure the best AJP and AFP programs. At times, their conduct seems as if each and every Dem piece claims to be at the center of the puzzle.

So far, puzzle masters Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer have been reasonably successful in their initial rounds of piece placement. Their efforts produced passage of the important ARP package that the president signed into law on Mar. 11. Sen. Schumer succeeded in the Senate’s passing the AJP on August 10. The AFP is stuck in both branches by the Dems’ internal struggles. The process has a ways to go before a hoped-for victory can be realized. 

This puzzle-making process is complicated. The Dems’ Progs and moderates have distinctly different ideas about what’s best for the AJP and AWP as well as themselves. In no small part because they likely will face different prospects for winning their Nov. 8, 2022 mid-term elections, depending on the BBB’s final construction and its public reception. These elections are mentioned now in the media as if they will happen the day after tomorrow. It’s actually 386 days from today.

The $1.2T AJP, primarily a physical infrastructure component of the BBB, was passed by a bipartisan majority in the Senate 69-30 and is now awaiting a contentious and delayed vote in the House. When the White House first proposed the jobs plan, they budgeted $2.6T expenditures to be spent over 8 years. Negotiations with Congress reduced this initial budget by 46% to $1.2T. This budget apparently includes a mere $550 billion of new funding, whatever that means. Many media outlets now further deflate the AJP to a $1T effort; apparently for Congress and the media $200 billion (B) is rounding error. After hearing these numbers, my sense is they’re at best illusory until the president signs his name on the laws.

This significant budget deflation in the AJP’s initial fiscal scope isn’t that unusual; it’s an almost normal part of the thoroughly arcane legislative process as many expenditure bills wind their way through multiple House and Senate committees to eventual floor votes.

The Dems’ internecine struggle between the Progs and their more moderate colleagues regarding the size and focus of the AFP has occupied media headlines for several months. The Progs outlined an initial budget of a utopian $6T for their family “infrastructure” support plan. Such colossal largess never was in the minds of moderates, fearful of their ensuing mid-term election chances. For a while now, the AFP has hovered at $3.5T. Progressive Dems’ dreams about such fiscal bounty wax mildly euphoric even at this lower budget level.

Altogether, the BBB plan could total $6.6T over the next decade. That is a lot of money, no matter how you dice it. This sum represents $19,800 for each and every US adult and child. The plan covers everything from free infant preschool and community-college tuition, expanded Medicare/Medicaid coverage, new electric bike and increased electric vehicle subsidies, much-reduced greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to lots of things in-between.

The scope of the BBB plan is so wide-ranging that no one really knows its exact content, only its rough cost – to the nearest hundred billion greenbacks or so. The White House Fact Sheets for the AJP and AFP list 69 different activities these two programs will undertake.

Unfortunately, such dramatic programmatic breadth is not accompanied by a comparably large margin for the Dems’ congressional votes. They have no votes to spare in the Senate versus the Repubs, and only 3 in the House.

This political headwind has struck the Dems in the guise of Senators Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema or as they’ve colloquially become known, Sen. Mansema. Neither the AJP or AFP will become law without Mansema’s two Senate votes.

Last week the thoroughly enigmatic Sen. Sinema took a brief Parisian jaunt in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, despite there being no saguaro cactus but surrounded by sublime baguettes. Perhaps her respite will provide perspective allowing her to explicitly state her AJP objections.

Sen. Manchin laid down his political Maginot Line on Oct. 14 when he said he was not in favor of the AJP’s Clean Electricity Performance Program (CEPP). This program will provide incentives for electric utilities to increase their annual investments in renewable power sources, and penalties if they don’t. He also previously mentioned he’d like to see the AJP’s budget reduced to below $2T. Reducing the scope and spending for the AFP is thus a reasonable likelihood.

In response to Sen. Manchin, the White House is seeking alternative mechanisms to reduce GHG, including creating a carbon tax. Many economists have long supported a carbon tax, but it has uniformly failed politically when attempted at the state level.[1] It’s very hard to see how the administration could support such a tax when the president has strongly vowed not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000 and given its singularly unsuccessful political history in the US. Talk of a carbon tax as a CEPP replacement mostly signals desperation within the administration.

Sen. Manchin’s complaint about the CEPP is that it will suffer from a significant free-rider problem, expressing that he has ”concerns about using taxpayer dollars to pay private companies to do things they’re already doing.” I suspect Sen. Manchin’s free-rider criticism is mostly a red herring about green energy policy, given that bituminous coal runs through his veins.

A growing number of regulated electric utilities have increased their green power production because of state-mandated Renewable Portfolio Standards, not federal rules. However, only 38 states have such standards currently.

Last year, renewable power accounted for 20% of US electric power generation, an all-time high, but still just one greenish kWh for every five brownish ones produced. The CEPP will provide uniform, nation-wide incentives and penalties for expanding green/renewable power’s share of national electricity production.

I’m surprised the president folded so soon against Sen. Manchin; he should call Sen. Manchin’s bluff on the CEPP. Without the CEPP, the AJP will suffer diminished projected GHG emission reductions by as much as 33%. That would represent a significant tragedy of the capitol commons and beyond in the real US. If the White House agrees to remove or curb the CEPP in order to pass the AJP, it will also complicate President Biden’s discussions at the up-coming UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow, Scotland.

There’s no doubt that furious closed-door brokering of alternative specifics for the final AJP and AFP will continue on the Hill and the White House for a while longer. Several pieces of the BBB puzzle have yet to be placed on the table. I hope the Dems understand that outlaying ever-larger funds to government agencies does not necessarily mean citizens’ lives will be ever-better or ever-more equitable. Because of their scope, these programs will be subject to hefty amounts of unintended consequences. From their outset, these programs must be appreciated as successful and effective or blowback will hamper the Dems.

It’s worthwhile remembering that the total federal budget for last year (FY2020) was $6.6T, the same dollar amount that the BBB is hoping to spend additionally over the next 8-10 years. Enlarging the federal governments’ duties – and consequent amplification of state and local government activities – needs to be done effectively.

Recent expansions in such obligations have been shaky, include those providing child care and rent relief payments. Fewer than 60% of families with incomes less than $25,000 properly received their due monthly child benefits. California barely managed to distribute less than 2% of its $5.2B of federal rent relief funds during the program’s first 3 months last year. The CA agency responsible for providing this benefit cited problems with its anti-fraud procedures. Perhaps the agency believed if it provided an all too slender amount of relief funds to qualified applicants, they would not have to worry as much about fraud? Such shoddy implementation results in exasperation, as well as the public’s downgraded view of government competency.

Unfortunately, there’s been little if any discussion about how the proposed panoply of significantly large benefit programs in the BBB will actually be implemented. Polling shows that the administration’s wobbly implementation of several recent programs is one factor that has just reduced by more than 20% the public’s support for having the government “do more to solve the nation’s problems.”

This is not good news for the Dems. The institutional stress on public agencies that will have responsibilities for successfully administering these giant, complex programs will be immense.

Dems, particularly Progs, would be wise to head such forewarnings. The Dems require strong, positive public support to extend and broaden their big BBB programs. This can happen by reducing the number and/or scope of several BBB programs, allowing each one to receive relatively more funding and attention, even if the top-line budget is reduced as it likely will be.

Although a majority of the public has all too little knowledge about specific BBB programs, recent polls say the most popular AFP programs are universal prekindergarten and reducing Medicare drug prices, the least popular is free community college.

Assembling the BBB puzzle will take insight, care and modesty. The Dems should remember Shakespeare’s Learian lament that demanding perfection can result in gaining next to nothing. They should consider fewer BBB programs to do better, not all of them and do worse.

 

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[1] Failures include two ballot attempts by the State of Washington to initiate a carbon tax. Several other states have proposed carbon taxes, none have been implemented. The city of Boulder, CO initiated a local carbon tax in 2006; it’s still in effect. A federal carbon tax is regularly proposed in the Congress, but no formal carbon tax legislation has ever passed. 

 

 

DROUGHT IN THE WEST

This is the end of innocence. ~ Don Henley  

Once again, California and the western US is suffering from a significant water drought. Water, a precious finite resource that sustains our lives, is a common resource needed by every living organism. Even though we 39.6 million residents innocently do not want to admit it, periodic droughts have been an all too regular feature of our environmental landscape for centuries.

Over the last twenty years, three out of four years in California and the American West have been drought years. It’s hardly surprising, given that we live in a semi-arid region. The US Drought Monitor shows that over 90% of California currently is suffering from “extreme” or “exceptional” water drought conditions. The on-going drought has contributed to 11 major fires and 7,738 incidents in the state according to Cal Fire this season.

A drought emergency was declared in May by the California Water Resources Control Board (Board). For the first time ever the US Dept. of Interior declared on Aug. 16 a water shortage on the Colorado River basin that provides much water to seven western states, including southern California. Last year, California received an out-sized 62% of the Colorado River Lower Basin’s water allocation. Starting in Jan. 2022, farmers, ranchers, and irrigation districts will be forced to use less water.

The Board has already reduced the amount of water CA farmers can draw from rivers and streams. These reductions are unusual because in well-endowed water politics, water power usually runs uphill to Sacramento. Although bountiful, the state’s agricultural output accounts for only 0.8% of the state’s GDP, but more than 80% of its potable water usage. Such water-intensity illustrates that no one can grow almonds, artichokes, grapes or lettuce without “liquid gold.”

If California wants to reduce its water consumption, agriculture is where decreases need to start first and foremost. The price of farmers’ irrigation water has been deeply subsidized by state and federal agencies forever. With its slight cost, California ag irrigators, as well as other users have had no economic incentive to conserve or efficiently use water.

We desperately need a completely-justified increase in water pricing. Who knows, perhaps this drought might entice water policy-makers to properly raise water’s price so the reduced volumes of H2O available for agricultural irrigators would be used far more effectively. Non-ag, residential customers would be incented to use Xeriscaping methods and otherwise conserve. Lawns would become an endangered “species.”

Surface irrigation systems – also called flood irrigation where water is pumped onto an entire farm section – is highly water-wasteful. Unsurprisingly, surface systems are the most commonly used ag water irrigation system, principally because of its very low initial capital cost. California almond growers, who use about 14% of California’s prime, irrigated their cropland, overwhelmingly use surface irrigation. Drip irrigation systems are far more water-efficient, providing water only to the individual plant’s root systems. Much of California’s wine-grape industry, which uses about 7% of the state’s prime, irrigated cropland, employs drip systems.

So far, Governor Newsom has imposed no water-reduction mandates for non-agriculture water usage that we citizens consume. It’s probably only a matter of time, now that the recall election is history.

Unlike the last drought that ended in 2016, the federal government swiftly has reduced water allocations by 75% in the Central Valley Project (CVP) to farmers and cities. The CVP provides about 20% of the state’s potable water through its huge system of reservoirs and canals. Reservoirs, like Shasta Lake shown below, are now less than 25% of capacity, and continue to drop rapidly every day.

 

Shasta Lake/reservoir, July 2021.

Before the winter rains hopefully begin in a month or so, it is vital that federal and state water policies throughout the western US are changed. Like others before it, this devastating drought’s impacts are caused in no small part by misguided policies in the water market.

It’s an unfortunately fine example of a liquid tragedy of the commons. This tragedy can be mitigated by increasing everyone’s water price to properly reflect its true, essential value. In addition, water districts can incentivize conservation by providing bill credits and rebates to customers who have reduced their usage by some minimal percentage – say 20% – via conservation or installation of water-saving methods that will decrease future usage. Such incentives have produced impressive reductions in electricity usage, but all too many water utilities and districts seem inured to their value. This hesitancy needs to end.

 

PARKING REQUIRED

In wilderness is the preservation of the world. ~ Henry David Thoreau   

‘Tis the season. Enjoying open-air parks provides healthful benefits during these pandemic and any other times. This year, after spending much of 2020 sequestered inside, evermore people have decided that enjoying outdoor parks is required, including us. On a regular basis, we go hiking in Tilden Regional Park that beckons several blocks from our home. Tilden is part of the impressive East Bay Regional Park District, which comprises almost 125,000 acres of woodland and trails on the eastern side of the San Francisco Bay. It is the largest urban regional park district in the US.

Humans have been hiking for as long as we’ve been hunting and gathering, which probably started two million years ago. Otzi, the ancient “ice-man,” died while hiking high in the Austro-Italian Alps about 5300 years ago, 5260 years before the fleece jacket was first worn by alpinists. He must have been quite chilly.

More recently, in 1336 the poet Petrarch recounted that he and his brother hiked and climbed for pleasure to the top of Mt. Ventoux, a 6,200ft mountain in southern France. Millions of people have walked on pilgrimages throughout many centuries in pursuit of moral and/or spiritual quests.

The interest in taking a walk through the countryside for its own sake perhaps became more earnest during the 18th century, possibly associated with the rise of Romanticism which elevated the importance of nature.

When cities significantly grew in the during the late 18th century – early-19th century Industrial Revolution, devastating yellow fever, cholera and diphtheria epidemics closely followed. The miasma theory of disease remained prominent and promulgated that diseases were caused by miasma, a toxic form of "bad air.”

Thus, a popular movement became dedicated to increasing “good air” spaces that could provide better public health and refuge from crowded city surroundings. Park-building was a reasoned response to these terrible diseases. Frederick Law Olmsted, whose first child died of cholera, was a significant proponent of such green spaces. In addition to being a landscape architect, he was a public health official. In 1858, Olmsted designed Central Park in New York City, as well as over 100 other public parks across the US.

Folks who want to a walk through the countryside in the 21st century assume tacitly that their journey usually will be on public land, like Tilden Park. But what is a “park”? It can be many things.

There are 22,493 public city parks in the US, according to most recent information. They provide an impressive array of facilities, including golf courses, dog parks, baseball diamonds, basketball hoops and playgrounds for local residents. Chugach Park, mostly within Anchorage, is the US’s largest city park, covering more than 464,000 acres. 

America’s oldest public city park is the Boston Common. Founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony city bought 50 acres of land from William Blaxton in 1634, allowing families to use it principally as a cow pasture. As folks kept putting additional cows on the common it became overgrazed – a prototypical example of the tragedy of the commons – Colony leaders limited the number of cows to 70 at a time.

Not only cows were using the Common; Ann Hibbins was executed for witchcraft in 1658. Mary Dyer was one of four Quakers hanged in 1660 for defying a law that banned Quakers from the Colony. Genuine park status for the Boston Common arose in 1830, when grazing cows were officially banned and two-legged beings were finally ascendant.

I grew up in Philadelphia, which is home to one of the largest urban parks in the nation. Fairmount Park was developed in 1855 to protect the city’s public water supply and preserve beneficial green spaces within its rapidly-growing industrialization. Fairmount Park is now associated with other Philadelphia parks, including Wissahickon Valley Park. I enjoyed lots of youthful explorations in this park, many with Skeeter, my best buddy. Perhaps the most memorable adventure was the time we found a battered, chrome-plated, one-armed slot-machine of unknown origin lying next to Wissahickon Creek. No, it wasn’t showing 3 aces.

Let’s move up a geographic level and consider state parks. There are over 6,600 public state parks in the US, covering 14 million (M) acres. The oldest state park is claimed by Niagara Falls State Park in NY, established in 1885. However, Georgia’s Indian Springs State Park has been operated since 1825, but did not gain official “state park” status until 1931. Also, in 1864 the federal government ceded Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Grove to be a California state park, which lasted for 26 years. The largest state park in the US is Adirondack Park, founded in 1892. Its 6M acres in northeastern NY include substantial privately-owned inholdings.

The first federal park was created by Congress in 1872 with the Yellowstone National Park Act. Since then, 19 different flavors of federal parks have been created by the National Park Service (NPS), which is part of the Interior Department. Given that the NPS just celebrated its 105th birthday and that there are now 423 federal parks of all types, it’s not that surprising there are so many types. The NPS oversees 84 million acres of land plus over 4 million acres of oceans, lakes and reservoirs. Unlike all the other park types, only Congress can designate a National Park.

These different types of parks include: 63 National Parks, the crown jewel of federal parkdom; 84 National Monuments that are managed by not only by the NPS, but also by the Fish and Wildlife Service (part of the Dept. of Agriculture) and the Bureau of Land Management (part of the Interior Dept.). Among other park types there are 19 National Preserves, 18 National Recreation Areas, including the Golden Gate Recreation Area which was the second most-visited “park” in 2020, and 25 National Battlefields.

The largest US national park is Alaska's Wrangell-St. Elias National Park & Preserve, at 13.2M acres. The largest national park in the world is the Northeast Greenland National Park (NP), created in 1974. This park covers a gigantic 240M acres, which is 2.4x larger than all of California’s bountiful acreage.

We often delight in the notion that the US “invented” the concept of national parks. Franklin D. Roosevelt stated, “There is nothing so American as our national parks.” Although true, it’s mistaken that Yellowstone was the world’s first national park. Nope, 94 years before Yellowstone became a national park, the local Mongolian government of the Qing dynasty created Bogd Khan Uul National Park not far from its capital, Ulaanbaatar. This Park is an impressively distant 9,320 miles from Berkeley. The expanse to Bogd Khan Uul would not even be a medium jaunt plus a few new turns for an Artic Tern, a bird that migrates an Olympian 44,000 miles each year.

Spreading our wings, we recently visited Kings Canyon-Sequoia National Parks in the Sierra Nevada and had a fine time. Sequoia became our second national park in 1890, six days before Yosemite. The picture below of me and our friend Katie shows us on top of the Mark Twain sequoia tree stump in Sequoia NP. That was one huuuuge tree before it was felled in 1891. Slabs of it were sent to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, the Smithsonian Natural History Museum in Washington, DC and a museum in London to prove that giant sequoias actually existed and weren’t just another “tall tale” from America’s wild west.

Atop the Mark Twain tree stump in Sequoia NP.

Before covid, in 2019 Yosemite had 2.4x as many visitors than Kings Canyon plus Sequoia. It wasn’t always that way; in 1969 Yosemite had only 1.2x as many visitors. The significant increase in Yosemite’s visitors during the past 50 years (93%) has been a conscious NPS policy, requiring substantial investments in human and physical infrastructure. Not all parks’ visitation has grown. Kings Canyon’s 1969 visitation was 1.5x bigger than in 2019. Nevertheless, smaller parks like Kings Canyon and Sequoia that did not receive such added infrastructure are doing fine.

Great Smoky Mountains National Park has been the most-visited park every year since 1944, with 12.1M visitors in 2020; there were 12.5M visitors in 2019. This summer the NPS is dealing with large upsurges in national park attendance as more folks seek gorgeous outside vistas, illustrated in this picture from Utah’s Arches NP.

Arches NP, July 2021.

No matter what local, state, national or international park you visit, for those who want to gain from having a great time hiking, backpacking, swimming or camping outdoors, I wish you many happy trails.