Let the Dinosaurs Die.

Dig Up the Roads!

Is This the End of the Age of the Automobile?

By HARVEY WASSERMAN

As a dominant form of transportation, the automobile is dead. So is GM, which now stands for Gone Mad.

But the larger picture says that the financial crisis now enveloping the world is grounded in the transition from the automobile---and the fossils that fuel it---to a brave renewable world of reborn mass transit and green power.

If GM lives in any form, it must be owned and operated by its workers and the public.

But the larger transition is epic and global, based on a simple structural reality: the passenger car is obsolete. Auto sales have plummeted not merely because of a bad economy, but because the technology no longer makes sense.

Franklin Roosevelt took GM over in 1943-5 to make the hardware to beat the Nazis. Barack Obama should now do the same to beat climate chaos.

Make streetcars, not passenger cars.

Hybrids are too little, too late, with problems of their own. Solar-powered electric cars will help phase out the gas guzzlers.

But in the long run, the automobile itself needs to be dismantled and re-cycled, not retooled or rebuilt.

Cars still kill 40,000 Americans/year, and thousands more worldwide. No matter how much less gas each may burn, they all consume unsustainable resources to manufacture, operate and terminate.

We need to dig up roads, not build more. We need rails and coaches, bio-diesel buses and self-propelled trolleys, Solartopian super-trains and in-town people movers, not to mention windmills, solar panels, wave generators and geothermal piping.

In America's corporate-conceived “love affair with the automobile,” our first spouse---mass transit---was murdered. Now the unsustainable obsolescence of the private passenger car is collapsing a global financial system built on the illusion of its constant growth.

Mother Earth can’t sustain the old four-wheeled carry-one-person-around-the-block paradigm, be it hybrid, electric or otherwise.

If the automobile and its attendant freeways continue to metastasize in India, China and Africa as they did in the 20th Century United States, we are doomed.

Our true challenge is to envision, engineer and build a Solartopian transportation system that moves people and things cleanly around a crowded planet with diminishing resources and no margin for ecological error.

For that we need every cent and brain cell devoted to what’s new and works, not what’s failed and could kill us all.

Harvey Wasserman, a co-founder of Musicians United for Safe Energy, is editing the nukefree.org web site. He is the author of SOLARTOPIA! Our Green-Powered Earth, A.D. 2030, is at www.solartopia.org. He can be reached at: Windhw@aol.com

From the Wire

Yesterday during a presentation at the state capitol related to a bill to reduce carbon emissions and the number of miles vehicles in Minnesota are driven, Sen. Julianne Ortman, R-Chanhassen, grew incredulous and asked, "Mr. Chair, are we still in America? ... I find that to be very offensive, an insult to every person who drives a car. I guess it insults me because I drove to the Capitol alone today. I find that very insulting."
Ortman was referring to an image from the cover of a 2002 book by the comedian Bill Maher, which was titled, "When You Ride Alone, You Ride with bin Laden: What the Government Should Be Telling Us to Help Fight the War on Terrorism."



Oh boy, this pushes all my buttons.

Prof Marshall raises a salient and important point of debate, one that is almost never talked about, but he fails miserably to demonstrate any strength in his conviction, and turns into such an obsequious little toady at the feet of a fat-ass Pol. The way he caves to her mock outrage is embarrassing and probably served to defeat his argument before he even got started.

Should we be surprised at Senator Fat-Ass's hissy fit? No, not at all. It seems nothing has changed from Bushie's 'Murika: " Tell us what we want to hear, not what the research shows, or your considered professional opinion." It would seem also that Senator Fatt-Ass is sticking to the playbook of keeping people as much in the dark as possible concerning the fact that the country is prosecuting wars of Imperial design. killing thousands, displacing millions, burning billions of gallons of oil and spending trillions of dollars in the process.

But is anyone asking what kind of carbon footprint the big green killing machine leaves behind?

This mock outrage is no great surprise, and in line with a significant and telling moment when the new Great Imperial Leader in his first speech said, "We will not apologize for our way of life." So as long as we 'Murikans can continue to consume and waste the majority of the world's resources and human capital, as long as the world continues to subsidize our cheap gas and our "non-negotiable way of life", then all is right with the world.

Why is it so offensive to suggest that it is unsustainable and the height of selfishness to drag around three empty seats and a ton and a half of metal on your daily travels through "Errandsville"?

So why is it so offensive to be even beyond rational discussion in a Senate hearing, that, god forbid, people might have to share a commute? People seem ready to embrace change, so long as it doesn't affect them personally.

+++

Whenever I have to stand and wait at a bus stop, or even waiting at red lights, I tend to count cars. Excluding all commercial vehicles, trucks and transit, I count only private autos, to see whether or not there is a passenger.

Typically, here is what I see.

On weekends it averages about 1:1, 50% of cars are single occupant. Midweek, midday, its about 3:1, 75%. Rushhour ramps up to 4:1 or more, typically 80-90% of cars carry one fat ass and three empty seats.

This is what is truly offensive.

Read me

Rep. Earl BlumenauerCongressman from Oregon
Posted February 6, 2009 | 06:44 PM (EST)


No, Seriously: Republicans Don't Get It

With this latest attempt to strip bike funding from the recovery bill, Republicans have once again demonstrated how out of touch they are with their pathologically short-sighted attacks on bicycles. To their detriment, they are continuing their trend from last Congress of using the most economical, energy-efficient, and healthy forms of transportation as their whipping post. Investment in bike paths will not only improve our economy, and take our country in the right direction for the future; it is exactly the kind of investment the American people want.

Moreover, bicycle and pedestrian paths are precisely the kind of infrastructure projects our country needs. These projects tend to the most "shovel-ready" and are more labor-intensive than other projects-- therefore putting more people to work per dollar spent.

We might have understood these attacks a decade ago, but today they ignore the explosion of bicycling in this country in recent years that has been nothing short of phenomenal. There are tens of millions of American cyclists and even more who want their children to be able to bike and walk to school safely and therefore support bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure projects.

American families have indicated time and again in the passage of bond measures across the country that they favor spending on alternative transportation, such as bicycles and mass transit, over spending on mere highway capacity. Americans want real solutions to the economic crisis, not just a band-aid fix. These investments will stimulate our economy now - when it counts and point our nation toward the economic and environmental realities of the future.

Recent transportation surveys indicate that 52% of Americans want to bike more than they do now - but don't, because of the lack of safe and connected bicycle facilities.

Think about it: More than 50% of working Americans live less than 5 miles from work, an easy bicycle commute. Already more than 490,000 Americans bike to work; in Portland, 8% of downtown workers are bicycle commuters. Individually, they are saving $1,825 in auto-related costs, reducing their carbon emissions by 128 pounds per year, saving 145 gallons of gasoline, avoiding 50 hours of being stuck in traffic, burning 9,000 calories, reducing their risk of heart attack and stroke by 50%, and enjoying 14% fewer claims on their health insurance.

Nationally, if we doubled the current 1% of all trips by bike to 2%, we would collectively save more 693 million gallons of gasoline - that's more than $5 billion dollars - each year. From 2007 - 2008, bicyclists reduced the amount Americans drive by 100 million miles.

Bicycling also has immediate and direct benefits for communities that invest in bicycle paths, bike lanes, trails, and secure bicycle parking. For each $1 million invested in an FHWA-approved paved bicycle or multi-use trail, the local economy gains 65 jobs and between $50 and $100 million in local economic benefits. Some communities are already showing the results of these investments. After investing less than 1% of their total transportation budget in bicycle facilities in the past eight years, the City of Portland has seen a 144% increase in bicycle use - and the growth of a $90 million bicycle industry that has added nearly 50 new businesses in just the past two years.

I can think of no other transportation investment that provides more benefits to American communities who so desperately need: more jobs, reduced transportation costs, increased personal health, a cleaner environment, reduced carbon footprint, and greater community livability. It's time the Republicans got the point about what Americans want. Investments in bike and pedestrian infrastructure will help us create jobs and build healthier more livable communities for the future - these projects are the gifts that keep on giving.

Same Old

Ray LaHood and Changing Our Thinking About Transportation
by ALEX STEFFEN
JANUARY 12, 2009

On Wednesday the 21st, the U.S. Senate will hold a confirmation hearing on the president-elect's choice of Ray LaHood for Secretary of Transportation. No one expects that hearing to be anything but easy for LaHood. That's too bad, because it shows that when it comes to greening the stimulus, we're not only missing the forest for the trees, we're not even seeing the trees right.

In case you haven't been following the news, LaHood is a conservative Illinois Republican with little transportation expertise and almost no administrative experience, who has earned a LCV lifetime voting score on critical environmental issues of 27 percent, and who maintains deep financial connections to the very industries he's now supposed to regulate. He may be no worse than most of those who've lead the Department of Transportation, but his appointment is a profoundly uninspiring vote for business as usual at a time when we need change, and an strong indication that the administration doesn't get that energy policy, technological innovation, urban planning, environmental sustainability and transportation are all bound up together, and no solution to our problems can be had without tackling them all together.

LaHood's appointment is so disappointing to transportation advocates who've been waiting eight years for change, that they're boiling with indignant disbelief, branding him "an unbelievably disastrous pick," "Status quo we can believe in" and "same.gov" (a dig at the Obama transition site, change.gov). As one insider summed it up: "It's a real read-it-and-weep moment."


read it all

Merry Christmas Everyone

Your Choice

“Climate change” has placed all humankind before a great choice: to continue in the ways of capitalism and death, or to start down the path of harmony with nature and respect for life.

--Evo Morales

Please read the full article.

Four E's of Safe Cycling

Education
Encouragement
Engineering
Enforcement