More on the Gulf

I’d like to direct you to this Orion Magazine article, "The Gulf Between Us," by Terry Tempest Williams.  It gives a human face to the disaster.

The oil is not gone. This story is not over. We smelled it in the air. We felt it in the water. People along the Gulf Coast are getting sick and sicker. Marshes are burned. Oysters are scarce and shrimp are tainted. Jobs are gone and stress is high. What is now hidden will surface over time.

What I want to highlight is not the specific environmental and personal damage caused by the disaster, but to discuss how every choice has a cost.  Our relationship with oil, and fossil fuels in general, has costs that do not appear at the pump or in the electric bill.  We have chosen to use a resource that can cause immediate disaster, like in the article, or the long-term disaster of global warming. 

We choose to mine coal and we get mountaintop removal and a polluted water table.  What we also get when we choose “no more taxes” is not to have our workplace safety regulations enforced.  We have said that an extra $1 in our pocket at the end of the year is more valuable than preventing another mine disaster, more valuable than the lives of the mine workers.

Remember that when it comes time to vote next week.  Remember the theme of this blog: the answer is not “tough luck,” but “we are in this together.”

How to start a political movement

Joe Romm and Bill McKibben discuss how to make climate change a viable political movement.  Thoughts?  It’s part of what this blog is trying to figure out.  When smarter and more active and influential people than I can’t come up with something concrete, where does that leave us?  Thoughts?

Really, it’s not over

Via Digby, via Naked Capitalism:

Guest Post: Reappearance of Huge Plumes of Oil is Making It Hard to Pretend that the Problem Has Disappeared

Click through to the links to read about all the human and animal illness, hemorrhaging, Corexit problems, and oil plumes.

What a relief that the well has been plugged and the problems are over!

Another note on supertrains

Sure, we all want superfast supertrains like they have in France and Japan, but we have a different concept of emminent domain here.  Unless you want to change our property laws, give up on the supertrains. 

We will discuss the impact of the New London decision another day.

Missing the point

According to an article in yesterday’s LA Times:

The California high-speed train project will receive at least $731 million from a $902-million grant the federal government awarded on Monday for rail improvements across the state.

According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, $715 million will help pay for the design and construction of a section of the planned bullet train in the Central Valley. An additional $16 million was earmarked for the high-speed rail corridor between San Francisco and San Jose.

You know how to better spend that money? On much less glamorous intra-city public transportation. How many people each day will ride a train from San Francisco to Los Angeles – 1000, 10,000, 100,000? How many people would benefit from improving bus and rail service in LA County? Ten million in the metropolitan area, first by making commuting easier, and then by reducing greenhouse gas emissions by the removal of those commuters from their cars.

Commuting

Question: how can I drive less when I have to get to work, can’t find a job closer to home, and public transportation isn’t a viable option?

Then: translate this into the big picture.  How do the millions of commuters in my situation, and even those who think they’re too good to ride the bus, get to work?  Hint: the answer is not “tough luck for you.”

We’re all in this together.  Cutting down everyone’s driving is a mutual benefit. 

Nothing to see here. Move along.

Looks like the gulf oil isn’t all gone.  Article here.  Pics here.

All we need is a disaster to prompt us to talk about our relationship with oil and its varied environmental devastation.  Or not.

Apples or oranges question: would you rather have the millions of barrels of oil in the gulf waters or in our atmosphere?

A Little Good News

Congratulations to my friend on his engagement.  Best wishes to you both!

Public Transportation

How do you improve public transportation?  A bus (or rail or subway) service needs to be extensive enough, reliable enough, and fast enough or it will not be attractive to potential riders.  But until the service reaches that critical point, those opposed to funding public transit can point the the service and say that no one uses it.  Why, then, should we spend more money on a service people don’t use?

I want to use public transportation for my work commute.  In fact, my commute is always morally painful.  I would love not to drive.  I could take a bus and two trains to get to work, costing me at least an additional hour each way, and not saving much money.  And each night I risk missing the last train home.  Frankly, my wife wouldn’t be thrilled with me catching the last train anyway and coming home through some of the most dangerous parts of Los Angeles at such a late hour.

So how do we improve the situation?  If someone like me, who wants to take public transportation, doesn’t, how can we make it attractive to people who don’t even want to take it in the first place?

Welcome

This blog is intended as a way to turn ideas into action.  We are facing an economic decline brought about by two separate, intertwined reasons: the increasing cost of energy and global warming.  Energy prices will continue to be a drag on our economy, while global warming morally mandates that we produce less and consume less.

But how do we deal with this impending negative-growth?  We’re past the point where discussing the issues addresses our predicament.  How do we turn our ideas, and I welcome hearing whatever you say they are, into a political movement?  And how do we make our transition as painless as possible for as many people as possible?