It's the Suede/Denim Secret Police! They Have Come for Your Uncool Niece!

Celebrate Earth Week (it's a week now?) with this Jill Stewart expose of the efforts of the "smart growth" lobby to dominate the global warming debate in California. Stewart finds head-scratching scientific skepticism of the idea that smart growth and clustered populations cut down pollution… and then watches Attorney General Jerry Brown buy the idea completely and utterly.

Jerry Brown is so certain he's right about urban density as a method for reducing warming that he is using his office's power, recently suing San Bernardino County, largely as an object lesson. (See accompanying story.)

Brown also speaks at statewide global warming "workshops" that offer virtually no scientific data and are, in fact, promotional events presenting his view that suburbs cause global warming and urban density fights global warming.

These sessions are not financed by the state government, but by smart-growth proponents who created a non-profit group calling itself the Local Government Commission (LCG) to tout their ideas. Aside from Brown, the group's promotional sessions also feature speakers from EDAW, a global firm of some 50,000 employees that is one of the world's most ardent, for-profit peddlers of dense, urban "smart-growth."

The science offered is so thin that, at one "workshop" last month, a smart growth proponent presented online photographs comparing an ugly, suburban shopping center to a cozy block of cute, urban shops. This was offered as an example of how suburbia creates distance and global warming.

More reason on the "smart growth" dogma here.