Months ago I posted a newsletter and associated “blog” to make a point about the importance of using less energy if we are going to bend our civilization toward a more sustainable planet. I’ve been relying on the comparative map above to convey an important point about public rail in Europe vs. the US. The map is clear as a bell, but the associated newsletter/blog arrived at this point circuitously. I’d like to clean this up a bit here, because the map – and the message, is useful, and important.
One of the dominant American arguments against public transportation hinges on this idea of “Individual Freedom” – freedom to choose how we get around. As much as we would all love to have unlimited “individual freedom,” anybody who has raised a child through the “Terrible Twos” knows that there needs to be limits. And the sooner we clarify those limits to the child, the more reasonable the home habitat becomes to the family.
This applies to the resource limitations of the home as much as it applies to the resource limitations of our planet.
Unfortunately, for the past dozen or so centuries, there has not been a Mom with the authority to reign in the “Terrible Twos” of Western European Civilization. I’m sure I don’t need to elaborate on all of the variations of Empire that have captured our economies and civilizations over these centuries; suffice it to say that the upcoming US national budget expresses it all. This directs $886 Billion for the military, and $704 Billion for everything else (education, healthcare, transportation, law enforcement, intelligence, governance, NOAA, Fisheries, Marine Mammal Commission, EPA, NASA, Department of the Interior, the State Department, etc…).
Tantrums of two-year-olds with those sorts of resource priorities are globally significant.
One of the proposed solutions to this conundrum has been to privatize the needed components of civil society (education, healthcare, transportation, etc…) and “let the market determine the value.”
Unfortunately, this is how we arrived at the situation where, thinking we have choices, all of our “choices” inure to privatized largess, not to our common good. There is a surfeit of examples in the US. We need to look no further than the privatization of our national healthcare as representative of the systematic failure in allowing capital and industry guide our national policies.
A flight between SFO and LAX takes only a bit over an hour from tarmac too tarmac, but getting in and out from car seat to car seat takes another four hours with parking, check-in, security, boarding, taxiing, and car rentals. Only about 30 minutes less than driving it in your own car.
So how do we use less energy? Moving bodies on a train takes less than 20% of the energy needed for moving the same bodies in planes or cars. Simple. Stop using planes and cars.
And how do we encourage this sensible shift in transportation strategies? It’s going to be a reach (that tantrum thing again), but heavily taxing things that conflict with our objectives while subsidizing things that harmonize with our objectives is the easy answer. We’ve been subsidizing fossil fuel forever. This we can stop as well (…cue the tantrum…)
There are enough adults in the room. We just need to set our sights on the horizon in the context of the common good, set boundaries, and not get distracted by the tantrums.
Very clearly presented. Sharing