While Portland's Mayor is going to the Vatican, Jeb Bush has a reservation in Purgatory

Portland Mayor Charlie Hales is one of 16 mayors from around the world invited to meet with Pope Francis next month as part of a global summit to discuss climate change. In 1993 the city adopted a plan to curb greenhouse gases and Hales, then a member of the Portland City Council, was instrumental in implementing a central tenet of the plan, reducing auto dependency. "Choo Choo Charlie" pushed to extend the light rail system, and to establish the first urban streetcar line in nearly half a century. Since 1996 Portland is the only city to have its per capita Vehicle Miles Traveled drop, while its greenhouse gas emissions reached 1990 levels a decade ago.

Hales also championed the Pearl District, a dense transit-oriented New Urbanist neighborhood where I recently moved.

I enjoy the benefits of a healthy quality of life, without a car I can easily navigate the city and meet the standard of good health by walking 10,000 steps a day. http://www.thewalkingsite.com/10000steps.html 

Unfortunately in autocentric Orlando, where I resided when Mr. Bush was governor, staying alive was the concern. Orlando had the highest pedestrian death rate in the nation, followed by Tampa Bay, Miami and Jacksonville. Orlando and St. Petersburg were ranked as the nation's angriest cities and, in 2000, a study by the Sierra Club named Florida (led by Orlando) the most sprawl threatened state.                          
           
                              Sprawl Threatened Cities by Size

Sprawl in problematic because it forces future generations to subsidize quick profits generated in the name of "free enterprise. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gG1T03NuZKM Climate change exacerbates this problem. In Miami, Mr. Bush's hometown, $1.5 billion is allocated to restructure an imperiled system of drains and sewers. This is only a down payment. Of the 4.2 million Americans living at an elevation of four feet or less, 2.4 million reside in South Florida.

Jeb Bush is the poster boy for burdening society with externality costs by prying profits from a low-lying peninsula prone to natural disaster.http://economics.fundamentalfinance.com/negative-externality.php In the early 1980s he established Bush Realty with Armando Codina, a wealthy supporter of the President George H.W. Bush. Deering Bay Yacht and Country Club exemplified their product line. The project lost millions after being battered by Hurricane Andrew, and it was unloaded to Al Hoffman, a wealthy developer (who George Bush appointed ambassador to Portugal). The free market took a much harder hit. Hurricane Andrew decimated the private insurance industry and, in 2002, Governor Bush established Citizens Property, a state insurance company to underwrite high-risk homeowners. State mandated insurance—socialism—is cost the Bush brothers--Jeb, George, and "Silverado" Neil--exact with the snake oil they ply. "A magical conception of the market," to quote Pope Francis. It is also what 1980 Presidential candidate George H.W. Bush called "voodoo economics." http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/19/opinion/voodoo-jeb-style.html?_r=0

Do you want your taxes insuring this project?

No wonder Mr. Bush is upset with the Pope. How would you like to confess the above project? Climate change is redefining sin, and not just for Catholics. Conservatives demand personal responsibility, but Deering Yacht and Golf Club will not survive without massive government investments. Bush faces a moral quandary. Christ's most elemental teaching, the call to sacrifice so others can live, is the testament Pope Francis preaches. Jeb Bush can ignore the teachings of Christ and St. Francis, but to what moral authority does he ascribe? Is he a nihilist?

Lewis Mumford, the acclaimed urbanist, observed that the natural environment was the common denominator in human life. Ensuring its health demanded virtue, the sacrifice of private rights for the public good. In 1938 this precept centered the plan he prepared for Portland, a prototype for modern urban civilization. Mumford encouraged envisioning new living patterns, provided they were tethered to nature. To ignore nature's constraints and hold to palliative "social myths" risked leaving future generation's with, he wrote, "nothing or rather nothingness." https://archive.org/stream/storyutopias00mumfgoog#page/n280/mode/2up

Pope Francis's encyclical is a call to embrace the life Mumford outlined, and that Portland eventually embraced. https://www.portlandoregon.gov/transportation/article/87292 A shift is occurring here, as new living patterns emerge. Although Mr. Bush will not accompany Mayor Hales to the Vatican, he will eventually have to embrace God, life, or nothing. The decision offers unmatched political theater.

Check livingnewurbanism.com Community Voice for my Orlando Sentinel editorials assessing then Governor Bush. ttp://www.livingnewurbanism.com/#!editorials/c1219