For such a generally well-informed guy the president-elect continues to display some notable environmental blind spots: he still seems to believe that agro-fuels have a future in this country and that unplugging cell-phone chargers is a worthwhile home energy-saver. Tell him we don't need to be building more roads as a way to get the economy moving. We have no shortage of blacktop. Transit and rail investment is the way to go.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Would make smaller BEVs a more workable form of personal transportation for urban/suburban dwellers.  

Hopefully we would build ample, affordable parking adjacent to the rail terminals.  Parking with plug-ins for recharging.

Even in these very difficult economic times the people of California voted to begin high speed rail between major urban centers of the state.

What won some of us over to the arguement is that it would be less expensive to build high speed rail than to upgrade our airports and freeways to carry future traffic in the ways that we now utalize.

We're going to spend money, one way or another.  Best to spend it in the most efficient manner.

Being able to board in city-center rather than making the trip out to the airport is a big extra  for many.  

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The suburbs are going to surive, one way or another.  Kunster makes some idiotic statements and predictions.  He's earned the right to be ignored.

As higher gas prices return (probably in the next six months as surplus supplies get burned off) people in suburbs will make short term and long term adjustments.

Short term - look for more car pooling, reducing unnecessary trips, heavier use of what public transportation exits, "sleeping at work", etc.

Look for people to pay more attention to gas mileage when purchasing a new vehicle.  The data (as I remember it) says that 50% of our driving is done with cars which are 5 or fewer years old.

I'd guess that those 5 years or fewer cars tend to be owned by people who commute distance.  Moving from a 20 mpg to a 30 mgp car makes $5 gas into $3 gas.

Long term - good batteries will mean affordable, long-range BEVs.  We know how to bring affordable electricity to the grid.  We know how to move electricity long distances with minimal loss.

The 'burbs are likely to be full of BEVs and owners who have a lot more money in their pocket than when they were spending $2 per gallon.

(The weak point in my scenerio is "good batteries".  I'm sure hoping that we get there soon.)

I think freeway accessible rail could really work.  A bus or truck pulls over the rail lane in the highway and wheels drop down to ride the rails and pickup electric power.  The fuel savings would justify the investment by industry and government.

Maybe higher speed tube sections could be part of the system, to handle high speed 200 mph commuter vehicles?  Trucks on regular freeway lane rail only.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

There's an interesting series by Jeff Vail at theoildrum.com recently about whether or not the suburbs can survive peak oil.  I think that the sooner we move to infilling suburbs, that is, putting town centers that are dense and mixed in the middle of suburbs (in some cases just reviving downtowns that died), the more practial bev's will be, and the more rail connecting those downtowns, the less the car will need to be used.

To put this "Will the suburbs survive?" question in a deep, deep hole and shovel dirt over it.

The real question is "What adjustments will the suburbs make as petroleum gets more expensive?"

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People are going to be very resistent to the idea of huddling together cheek to jowl in crowded cities.  Sure, some people like that lifestyle, but many people don't.

People are willing to pay a bit more, in both money and time, to live where they can have a more space and less crowding.

BEVs, light rail (like Sacramento and Bangkok), electric express buses, lots of more efficient ways to move people in and out of cities.  And we are looking at a "real soon" generation of 40+mpg cars.

Moving some of the cities to the suburbs as is happening in some cities such as Sacramento where businesses are locating well outside of the city center which allows people to live in the 'burbs with short commutes. Villages which have 2-3 "major" employers and all the daily shopping needs covered.  Connected  by efficient public  transportation.

More tele-commuting.  I've got a neighbor who teles 6-7 hours away from his "workplace".  He goes into the office every couple of months.

The problem with passenger trains is that they lose money, while freight makes money. Thus most passenger services such as AMTRAK are subject to never-ending guv'mint bail-outs and price supports.

Most authorities cite freight as being 4 to 14 times more efficient when using rail instead of highway trucks (400% to 1400%). However, the best passenger trains can do it about 18% more than a conventional car in terms of fuel consumption and resulting CO2 emissions; the Acela high-speed train can only add another 8% for regenerative braking for a total of a 26% increase in efficiency over cars (not bad).

Of course this is a little smoke and mirrors, because things are getting more efficient over time, and the nature of vehicle activity changes as well. But the FACT is that any passenger rail anywhere doesn't really reduce emissions in such a significant way and is not sustainable in terms of revenue. I wish I didn't have to be the bearer of such news but it is the truth: reductions in CO2 from passenger rail are marginal and come at great expense. The budget for AMTRAK is an additional 2.6 billion over what it makes of tickets and all its other revenue, a very large annual investment.

it would have been so much cleaner if passenger rail made money and had some modest reductions in CO2 emissions - let's put it that way.

I can see the Bos-Wash and Chicago areas expanding train service in those areas, which has been borne out by recent statistics for these old-city regions. Other states such as Texas pay for a lot of that rail and subway funding through the gasoline tax while the locals do not. That raises the specter of what I call "geographic injustice." Why can't Texas get high speed, regional, and local funding like what we give to the Northeast? And if Peak Oil Theory is right (I have some doubts about the immediacy), won't we need a new way to fund such expensive commuter rail projects, other than the gas tax?

To reiterate: moving people is a poor idea on rail simply because the railcars weigh so much, and the passenger load weighs so little. It is very simple math. It makes far more sense to move 50 or 100 ton loads per railcar of freight. If you design a lightweight passenger railcar that is safe, I suppose it might work - suffice it to say MAG-LEV and other technologies are a horrendous waste of electricity and that electricity came from power plants (a reason why I question electric cars powered by coal power plants). It's not looking too good, folks, unless we get some revolutionary technology here.  -sam

Onward through the fog

"revolutionary technology" or do we need to build out what we have that works?

Just eyeballing it, the type of cars use by BART or Bangkok's SkyTrain look efficient in terms of car weight/people on board.  They look to weigh less per person than does a typical private vehicle.  

Hooked together, several of them are going to be more aerodynamic than a group of individual cars strung out along the highway.  (Train cars draft.)  

And the lead car can be more aerodynamic than what most of us would be willing to drive in public.

Then, we know how to make electricity in "green" ways.  We can send electricity along metal tracks more efficiently than we can run personal vehicles with battery packs.

Those light rail cars such as made by Bombardier Corporation are only meant for local, short-line transit and cannot be certified to high speed or interstate uses by the Fed. So if you're talking local short-hop transits within parts of a city, that science has been around since the 1800's. It's called a tramway.

I've helped conduct studies of light rail in Austin TX and we similarly only found marginal CO2 benefits from the program. The real purpose of the whole thing is to reduce congestion and enhance "rail development districts" which yes, do seem to benefit as to land prices. Been there, done that.

Onward through the fog

Are you saying that the current light rail cars aren't safe enough or are you saying that we can't make lightweight, safe rail cars?

And are you saying that there is some sort of reason that we must continue to make electricity from CO2 emitting fossil fuels?

sammie, First, most (all?) Amtrak is diesel.  It needs to be electrified, a professor friend priced that out at 100 billion dollars, probably 20 years ago.  When I personally talk about trains, I generally add the adjective "electric", because particularly right now it would be ridiculous to set down a diesel-powered system.

Second, I think that cost comparisons based on anything running on an oil derivative needs to have a huge boulder of salt added to it -- in other words, it needs to assess the comparison between oil-based cars , through time, not just right now.  That is, if one is interested in something long-term.

Third, and I wish I had the statistics readily available but I don't, electric trains, if filled to a decent extent, have much better CO2 comparisons than any other form of transit -- I mean, if they're electric, and they don't use coal-based electricity, they have virtually no emissions, as would electric cars.

So the bottom line is, if the country (world) wants to get serious about climate change, it seems to me, we need a solar/wind electric network supplying electric trains and electric cars.  The idea is very simple, the technical problems are not overwhelming, and the political challenges are ginormous, certainly the worst part of the problem.

Bob -- I admit sometimes Kunstler overdoes it, but caution would indicate, I think, that we need to understand how many suburbs would be able to move anything around in the absence of oil.  The lack of planning for anything approaching horribly expensive gasoline is rather mind-boggling.  I mean, you don't have to assume that the worst would happen, but I think there should be plans in place to deal with reasonably bad scenarios, and I see no indication of that.

We're dreaming of the not too distant future, yes?

OK, electric light rail gets masses of people from home to work.  Short distant freight moves on the same rails during non-commute time.

"UPS" runs their trucks on electricity.  They establish change points where they can swap out a set of fresh "40 mile" batteries.  Wouldn't need to be any larger than a tall one car garage.  And fully automated.

Large, long distance freight moves on big rail.  Perhaps fueled by biofuels as electrification from coast to coast might be too expensive.

Once at distribution hubs it moves to light rail/electric truck.

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Where the "K" blew it was in accepting that peak oil = no oil.

We don't go from cheap oil to no oil.  We go from cheap oil to slightly expensive oil to more expensive oil to very expensive oil.  

Along the way we introduce alternatives to oil, just as we are now doing.  Each of those alternatives takes some steepness out of the curve.

Steepness, because I think we've led ourselves astray by portraying "peak oil" as a type of bell curve.  You know, supply goes up, plateaus, falls off.

That's not reality.  Supply continues more or less at what we desire for a long, long time (remember we could tap shale oil, etc.) but the price increases as easily pumped oil is depleted.

(Sorry for any spelling problems.  I'm a terrible speller and my Chrome spell checker is malfunctioning.)

.....See the "Horsemen of the Apocalypse" ride.

"Blitz" lines are a sign of the times. These 'lines' are designed to evince rampaging greed. How many other ploys can you think of that surreptitiously exploit human avarice?

Here and now we behold the chimera, the "paint horse and its pin-striped-suited rider, named GREED" being followed closely by a pale horse ridden by Death.

.........soon. Life as we know it and a good enough future for the children could depend upon it.

Please speak loudly and clearly because many too many leading opinion-makers in the human family are refusing to connect the dots and turning away from what come somehow be real.

If a culture treats the unbridled accumulation of possessions and filthy lucre as virtuous behaviors, not as vices, then the "paint horse and its pin-stripe-suited rider, GREED," are free to run wild, just as occurred in Valley Stream, New York on Black Friday.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
hppt://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php

My internet is woefully challenged today but I see you point, Jon Ryan. The issue with electrification of anything means going back to the source of the juice. Some caveats: there is no such thing as zero emissions because to electrify and build rail you need massive amounts of steel, aluminum, and so forth. One day we'll get better at the Life Cycle thing because CO2 analysis requires it.

Before my internet cuts out again, I did have some questions about hi-speed rail and "mag-lev" technologies that seem to require massive amounts of power. Anyone looked into that in the context of greenhouse gases?  -sam

Onward through the fog

......   and the many 'objects' of human avarice.

A culture that defines its very raison d'etre by endless accumulation of material possessions; by the unbounded acquisition of more money, money, money, money; by recklessly overconsuming and relentlessly hoarding limited resources, demonstrably declares to all the world that greed is good.

Are we not members of a culture that worships consumerism? Are the products of greed nothing more or less than the objects of our idolatry?

Are the pin-striped suits, fleet of cars, chauffeur, private jets, McMansions, distant hideaways, secret handshakes and exclusive clubs...... all signatures of success in a culture borne of the 'goodness' of greed?

Consider for a moment what greed has wrought.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001