HHUA Expert Panel with Robert Poole and LaVonda Atkinson

ACCOUNTABILITY OF BIG INFRASTRUCTURE PROJECTS was an expert panel presentation in Honolulu, Hawaii organized by the Hawaii Highway Users Alliance.  The event took place at the Pacific Club on February 6, 2015.


MIT Engineer Robert Poole spoke about Reducing Risks in Transportation Mega-Projects 

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     Robert Poole is a co-founder of Reason Foundation and its president from 1968 to 2001. Los Angeles based Reason Foundation is committed to advancing "the values of individual freedom and choice, limited government, and market-friendly policies." Bob is an MIT-trained engineer and the author of Cutting Back City Hall. Bob has advised the Ronald Reagan, the George H.W. Bush, the Clinton, and the George W. Bush administrations.
     Bob has also advised many agencies and state DOTs. For example, in 2008 he served as a member of the Texas Study Committee on Private Participation in Toll Roads, appointed by Gov. Rick Perry. In 2009, he was a member of an Expert Review Panel for Washington State DOT, advising on a $1.5 billion toll mega-project. In 2010, he was a member of the transportation transition team for Florida's Governor-elect Rick Scott.


Cost Engineer LaVonda Atkinson spoke about The Billion Dollar Mile 

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     LaVonda Atkinson has worked as a program cost control analyst for 20 years.  Mrs. Atkinson has managed billion dollar projects for NASA, Department of Defense, Department of Energy, Federal Transportation Agencies and others in both the government and private sector. 
     Mrs. Atkinson began cost control and analysis of the San Francisco T-line extension in 2012, a project funded with $1 billion dollars per mile by Federal tax payer dollars.  Mrs. Atkinson blew the whistle for civil servant abuses of power, misappropriation of congressional funds and an overall misuse of the American citizens’ trust.  Mrs. Atkinson found a brood of unethical government contractors and incapable government enforcers.
     Just two days after her presentation in Honolulu, Ms. Atkinson was announced as a recipient of the 2015 James Madison Freedom of Information Award!

The Lack of New Warming Is a Surprise -- Recall Al Gore!

These two graphs from a major article in The Economist (see source below) clearly indicate that:

1.  Global Warming occurred between 1985 and 1998, but Earth's temp has remained fairly steady for 15 years now!
2. The predictions of Global Warming models are incorrect.
3. The yellow lines indicate the year when Al Gore and IPCC received the Nobel Prize "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change" (the bold is mine.)

Global Warming alarmism has caused the inappropriate issuance of two Nobel Prizes (Gore and Obama) and the unnecessary brainwashing of millions of young children at their schools.  Global Warming alarmism gave more support to "environmentalists" whose most prominent successes are to pick the wrong winners (e.g., cost ineffective renewables and rail systems) and make life more expensive in first world populations, and more difficult to rise out of poverty for third world populations.

Now The Economist from Europe, where the core support of Global Warming alarmism is located, has provided some reasonable perspective which shows that:

• There is no denying that some Global Warming (GW) has taken place.
• GW has remained stable for at least a decade.
• Models used by the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) predict the wrong trend.
• GW did not increase despite the billions of tons of anthropogenic (man-made) CO2 emissions
• Arctic ice does melt to unusual levels in the summer months but no appreciable sea level rise has been recorded.
• Nobody knows what the real effects of an increasingly less possible GW are.

The main article of The Economist is titled Climate science: A sensitive matter -- Here are a few interesting quotes from this comprehensive article:

• "Temperatures fluctuate over short periods, but this lack of new warming is a surprise."
• "The mismatch between rising greenhouse-gas emissions and not-rising temperatures is among the biggest puzzles in climate science just now."
• Despite all the work on [the planet's] sensitivity [to carbon dioxide emissions,] no one really knows how the climate would react if temperatures rose by as much as 4°C.

Three days later The Economist added a short article to calm down Europe's socialists and Obama-like pro carbon taxation politicians (see last bullet below). These politicians need to keep people focused on secondary problems like the GW, because primary problems such as huge budget deficits and problematic pension and health care systems cannot be addressed in the socialist realm of thought. The short article is titled Global warming: Apocalypse perhaps a little later. Exact quotes below. The bold section is mine.

• The science that points towards a sensitivity lower than models have previously predicted is still tentative. The error bars are still there. The risk of severe warming—an increase of 3°C, say—though diminished, remains real.
• Bad climate policies, such as backing renewable energy with no thought for the cost, or insisting on biofuels despite the damage they do, are bad whatever the climate’s sensitivity to greenhouse gases. (Thank you for this. I am sorry to inform you that California, Hawaii, The Blue Planet Foundation and several "environmentalists" do not subscribe to reason, cost-effectiveness analysis or The Economist.)
• Good policies—strategies for adapting to higher sea levels and changing weather patterns, investment in agricultural resilience, research into fossil-fuel-free ways of generating and storing energy—are wise precautions even in a world where sensitivity is low.
• Put a price on carbon and ensure that, slowly but surely, it gets ratcheted up for decades to come. 

I enjoy The Economist for its variety of subjects, reasonable depth of analysis and humor.  I'm sorry, humour. I was disappointed that nowhere did they ask for a recall of Al Gore's and IPCC's Nobel. The two shared a Nobel Prize in 2007.

West Oahu Development: Meat and Potatoes or Gravy Train?

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Sustainable Growth for Hawaii -- Expert Panel Program

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