We are running out of oil. We have been since Drake drilled his first Pennsylvania well. Oil is a finite commodity. Unlike wood, or wind, or sunlight, the earth contains a certain number of barrels. While I don’t know what that figure is, I do know it is fixed.
The intelligent response is to use oil wisely. We haven’t been. We drill off the coast and on Alaska’s North Shore because we have depleted the oil in the easy places like Oklahoma and Texas.
We could have been raising the required fleet MPG average, including pickup trucks in the fleet average, developing alternatives to gasoline power engines, increasing subsidies for high speed rail, raising the gas tax to discourage use and fund research. We didn’t.
Europeans are better at this. Gas at the pump is much higher than in the U.S. Almost everybody drives very small cars or scooters or uses bikes. Public transportation is available and fairly reliable, and intercity rail is high speed.
We had a gas crisis in the Seventies, but we learned very little from it.
High Speed Rail like wind power sounds great on paper but not in reality. Sure I would love to see a high speed rail form Boston to DC but imagine the cost of such a system. Where exactly are you going to put it? I can not think of any place a high speed rail could go that would be economically possible. Look how much trouble the "Big Dig" ran into in Boston. I have heard all the arguments about other countries that do it....most of which are TINY compared to the US and most of which did it decades ago. In my opinion the money would be better spent on a high speed internet. High Speed Internet would do a lot more for the country and business than the dream of a high speed rail.
ReplyDeleteI believe that high speed rail would be effective in case where longer distance travel is required by people. There must be easy access to stations and that is the major problem as these areas are ones of large population and built up, that makes it very cost prohibitive. That is why it will not go anywhere.
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