You're missing the key impact. California has no shortage of water. The Pacific water level is actually rising. We just need more energy and a lot of desalinization, like any normal industrialized country.
That energy better be clean, so we buy nuclear, enhanced geothermal, even some wind and solar if you want. Please none of NRDC's preferred "Unspecified Imports from Wyoming" which California "enviros" pretend isn't coal, as they continue their cult-like AntiNukeism.
I'm not a golfer... software engineers rarely play golf.
But I'll happily support the expansion of irrigated golf courses. I hope they have enough water traps for the waterfowl to thrive.
Being Pro Golf is the best Environmental Movement we need right now.
Get out of the unpopular austerity mindset.
And California should run the Colorado River backwards, as Israel had done for the Jordan River. California shouldn't take one drop of precious water needed by landlocked states-- not until the Pacific Ocean dries out. Send the Pacific's abundant water upstream to AZ, NM, and NV. And don't let the wild lands dry out either. In fact if we pump freshwater underground we can stop the land from sinking due to past and current immense water withdrawals.
The more I read, the more I sided with banning golf. In particular, it's _rich_ to accuse your opponents of worshipping pristine nature in the same breath as claiming that becoming more outdoorsy "changed [you] for the better". You didn't become better because you started liking camping a little more.
I've seen plenty of golf courses that were just there to make use of flood prone areas, like on a dam at that elevation between normal pool level and th spillway... you can't build there anyway. Some great courses have been made by incorporating an existing wetlands with design elements of the course. There are lot's of old landfills with golf courses on then, can't build on those either. You can drain a swamp but they rarely stay drained long enough to suit insurers. Put it a golf course and make the municipality enough revenue to support all the green spaces.
It's not clear that water (that seems to be the issue with golf courses) actually involves any environmental externality at all. In dry regions water IS often mispriced and it perhaps being supplied to golf courses at a low price when it has a higher values elsewhere, but Connecticut?
Frederic Bastiat, in his great essay "That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen" explores in depth the phenomenon you are talking about, where politicians, activists, and citizens focus on the readily salient and visible, and neglect the things they cannot readily see, like the consequences of their choices when those consequences fall on people who are not them. Golf courses are visible and coded "rich", a synonym for evil in some circles. The organic food markets and the farms that supply them aren't even in their considerations.
As long as a golf course is paying a non-subsidized market rate for water, their usage is not an issue. If it is, the issue is with the market price for water, which authorities have not set high enough to encourage conservation nor counter aquifer depletion.
I hate golf, but I am a pilot and the same arguments happen about airports around the country, especially ones near urban areas. Thing is though, you could have the government grab all of the courses or airports in CA by eminent domain, and not a single new house would be built. All you would get is an overgrown field that catches on fire every September like clockwork.
Golf courses require lots of maintenance, and clearly there is a long line of people willing to sign up to pay for that maintenance.
I agree with the overall thrust of the essay though. Let people do what they want, lest someone else gets in charge and starts telling you what you can and can’t do in your free time!
I live in the 30th most DENSELY populated county in the U.S ON A GOLF COURSE, I don't golf.
During the Pandemic...golf courses were OPEN...the BEACHES were closed.
(Relatively) untouched green space is now down to 3% in my county, development is strong.
If my golf course were "shut down" to please the eco-terrorists, it would be replaced by asphalt and 1200 apartment units...further taxing our ecology, sustainability, and traffic. We fought off a developer a few years ago with such plans. Our open space absorbs tons of water, provides a home to thousands animals, sequesters carbon, and mitigates noise and shades and cools the neighborhood.
No one will confuse a golf course with "pristine" nature, but for some...it's (practically) all we have left.
Could the golf courses be a bit "smarter" about sustainability? Maybe plant some solar cells and leave more bushes for the critters? SURE.
Mine is a public course so EVERYONE is welcome, and in a county where many live in small apartments and homes with limited views, a walk in our PARK, must be especially nice. Where else are they going to see squirrels, raccoons, alligators, heron, cranes, ducks, bald eagles?
A healthy community offers THIRD PLACES (other than work and home) so people can mingle, recreate and enjoy life and nature...golf courses do that in spades.
Let's work on REAL PROBLEMS FIRST...before trying to "solve" a problem that doesn't need fixing.
If one places NO value to green space, then more development might be seen positively. However, first pkease spend some time understanding the many benefits of urban green space. There is a reason highly desirable cities PRESERVE their spaces even in the face of extraordinary development pressures.
Tell a NYC resident, you’re developing Central Park…that would be a short conversation.
One, golf courses are largely lawns not parks, that's an important and underrated difference.
Two, there are certainly tradeoffs, and there's probably an optimal amount of urban green space, and the optimal amount is probably not zero - but none of these arguments justify the huge waste of space for golf specifically (how does Central Park compare to a golf course, I wonder? 3,41 km² vs. ~0.7 km², so about five times more. Now how many more golf courses are there than parks?)
Three, quite a number of golf courses, despite formally being classified as "urban", are actually in zones that are... not.
Yep, that's right, build more housing - increase water demand, increase runoff, increase population, increase urban heat islands, increase noise, increase traffic congestion, and while you're at it, decrease available urban habitat for wildlife, diminish flood storage capacity (many golf courses are built in flood plains as an acceptable urban use), wipe out urban wetlands - what can go wrong? All that grass and rough and trees absorb CO2, you know, and you want to turn that into a 7-level apartment building?
Blaming golf courses is little more than blaming the stairs for the broken leg, a scapegoat for those unwilling to solve the real problems. Of course, the hunt for a good scapegoat is always successful.
A simple solution could be that all the golf clubs public or private pool money together through their national associations and invest in desalination plants whose fresh water output will exclusively be used pro-rata to their contribution to the pool. Government should implement a cut-off date such as 1/1/2030 by which all golf clubs must use fresh water from 100% renewable sources, such as desalination, waste water and collectors.
I think it’s silly to ban golf. People like it; it’s not that bad as you say. But calls to ban golf risk disenfranchising the urban poor? lolz. They should put those golf courses in Oakland up for a referendum. I suspect more people would rather they be a free park. In that situation the big issue with golf is that it takes a huge amount of space for low density recreation. When they opened up SF golf courses as parks during the pandemic there were thousands and thousands of people out there.
This one doesn’t land for me. Wanting a park with trees and flowers that everyone can use instead “a good walk ruined” seems like a perfectly sensible goal to work for. Labeling these people as anti-social and eco-puritans is *really* over-reaching and is taking the Breakthrough philosophy too far. Maybe at least try to build some bridges with people who appreciate the beautiful and wild world.
You're missing the key impact. California has no shortage of water. The Pacific water level is actually rising. We just need more energy and a lot of desalinization, like any normal industrialized country.
That energy better be clean, so we buy nuclear, enhanced geothermal, even some wind and solar if you want. Please none of NRDC's preferred "Unspecified Imports from Wyoming" which California "enviros" pretend isn't coal, as they continue their cult-like AntiNukeism.
I'm not a golfer... software engineers rarely play golf.
But I'll happily support the expansion of irrigated golf courses. I hope they have enough water traps for the waterfowl to thrive.
Being Pro Golf is the best Environmental Movement we need right now.
Get out of the unpopular austerity mindset.
And California should run the Colorado River backwards, as Israel had done for the Jordan River. California shouldn't take one drop of precious water needed by landlocked states-- not until the Pacific Ocean dries out. Send the Pacific's abundant water upstream to AZ, NM, and NV. And don't let the wild lands dry out either. In fact if we pump freshwater underground we can stop the land from sinking due to past and current immense water withdrawals.
The more I read, the more I sided with banning golf. In particular, it's _rich_ to accuse your opponents of worshipping pristine nature in the same breath as claiming that becoming more outdoorsy "changed [you] for the better". You didn't become better because you started liking camping a little more.
I've seen plenty of golf courses that were just there to make use of flood prone areas, like on a dam at that elevation between normal pool level and th spillway... you can't build there anyway. Some great courses have been made by incorporating an existing wetlands with design elements of the course. There are lot's of old landfills with golf courses on then, can't build on those either. You can drain a swamp but they rarely stay drained long enough to suit insurers. Put it a golf course and make the municipality enough revenue to support all the green spaces.
It's not clear that water (that seems to be the issue with golf courses) actually involves any environmental externality at all. In dry regions water IS often mispriced and it perhaps being supplied to golf courses at a low price when it has a higher values elsewhere, but Connecticut?
Frederic Bastiat, in his great essay "That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen" explores in depth the phenomenon you are talking about, where politicians, activists, and citizens focus on the readily salient and visible, and neglect the things they cannot readily see, like the consequences of their choices when those consequences fall on people who are not them. Golf courses are visible and coded "rich", a synonym for evil in some circles. The organic food markets and the farms that supply them aren't even in their considerations.
As long as a golf course is paying a non-subsidized market rate for water, their usage is not an issue. If it is, the issue is with the market price for water, which authorities have not set high enough to encourage conservation nor counter aquifer depletion.
I hate golf, but I am a pilot and the same arguments happen about airports around the country, especially ones near urban areas. Thing is though, you could have the government grab all of the courses or airports in CA by eminent domain, and not a single new house would be built. All you would get is an overgrown field that catches on fire every September like clockwork.
Golf courses require lots of maintenance, and clearly there is a long line of people willing to sign up to pay for that maintenance.
I agree with the overall thrust of the essay though. Let people do what they want, lest someone else gets in charge and starts telling you what you can and can’t do in your free time!
I live in the 30th most DENSELY populated county in the U.S ON A GOLF COURSE, I don't golf.
During the Pandemic...golf courses were OPEN...the BEACHES were closed.
(Relatively) untouched green space is now down to 3% in my county, development is strong.
If my golf course were "shut down" to please the eco-terrorists, it would be replaced by asphalt and 1200 apartment units...further taxing our ecology, sustainability, and traffic. We fought off a developer a few years ago with such plans. Our open space absorbs tons of water, provides a home to thousands animals, sequesters carbon, and mitigates noise and shades and cools the neighborhood.
No one will confuse a golf course with "pristine" nature, but for some...it's (practically) all we have left.
Could the golf courses be a bit "smarter" about sustainability? Maybe plant some solar cells and leave more bushes for the critters? SURE.
Mine is a public course so EVERYONE is welcome, and in a county where many live in small apartments and homes with limited views, a walk in our PARK, must be especially nice. Where else are they going to see squirrels, raccoons, alligators, heron, cranes, ducks, bald eagles?
A healthy community offers THIRD PLACES (other than work and home) so people can mingle, recreate and enjoy life and nature...golf courses do that in spades.
Let's work on REAL PROBLEMS FIRST...before trying to "solve" a problem that doesn't need fixing.
So... building more housing in place of golf courses would be bad? That's... a take.
If one places NO value to green space, then more development might be seen positively. However, first pkease spend some time understanding the many benefits of urban green space. There is a reason highly desirable cities PRESERVE their spaces even in the face of extraordinary development pressures.
Tell a NYC resident, you’re developing Central Park…that would be a short conversation.
One, golf courses are largely lawns not parks, that's an important and underrated difference.
Two, there are certainly tradeoffs, and there's probably an optimal amount of urban green space, and the optimal amount is probably not zero - but none of these arguments justify the huge waste of space for golf specifically (how does Central Park compare to a golf course, I wonder? 3,41 km² vs. ~0.7 km², so about five times more. Now how many more golf courses are there than parks?)
Three, quite a number of golf courses, despite formally being classified as "urban", are actually in zones that are... not.
Yep, that's right, build more housing - increase water demand, increase runoff, increase population, increase urban heat islands, increase noise, increase traffic congestion, and while you're at it, decrease available urban habitat for wildlife, diminish flood storage capacity (many golf courses are built in flood plains as an acceptable urban use), wipe out urban wetlands - what can go wrong? All that grass and rough and trees absorb CO2, you know, and you want to turn that into a 7-level apartment building?
Blaming golf courses is little more than blaming the stairs for the broken leg, a scapegoat for those unwilling to solve the real problems. Of course, the hunt for a good scapegoat is always successful.
Urban habitat for wildlife is supposed to be exactly zero (because procurated parks are not wildlife). I am not sure if you're trolling.
A simple solution could be that all the golf clubs public or private pool money together through their national associations and invest in desalination plants whose fresh water output will exclusively be used pro-rata to their contribution to the pool. Government should implement a cut-off date such as 1/1/2030 by which all golf clubs must use fresh water from 100% renewable sources, such as desalination, waste water and collectors.
I think it’s silly to ban golf. People like it; it’s not that bad as you say. But calls to ban golf risk disenfranchising the urban poor? lolz. They should put those golf courses in Oakland up for a referendum. I suspect more people would rather they be a free park. In that situation the big issue with golf is that it takes a huge amount of space for low density recreation. When they opened up SF golf courses as parks during the pandemic there were thousands and thousands of people out there.
This one doesn’t land for me. Wanting a park with trees and flowers that everyone can use instead “a good walk ruined” seems like a perfectly sensible goal to work for. Labeling these people as anti-social and eco-puritans is *really* over-reaching and is taking the Breakthrough philosophy too far. Maybe at least try to build some bridges with people who appreciate the beautiful and wild world.
They will have to pry my sand wedge out of my cold dead hands...