When Utopias Collide: Slow-Speed Rail and the Politics of CO2
Have you heard about California’s high-speed rail project? In 2008, voters in the nation’s most populous state narrowly approved a $10 billion bond measure to support construction of a $45 billion bullet train system servicing the state’s major cities. The bulk of the funding, the story went, would be kicked in by the Federal Government, with private investors participating to validate the fiscal soundness of the project.
Fast forward to present day: Projected costs have more than doubled for a downsized system; the completion date has been pushed out into the 2030s; federal money is nowhere in sight; the estimated fare for a San Francisco to Los Angeles ticket has increased a whopping 59 per cent. Government as usual.
All this would sound the death knell for a fiscal white elephant but for that tantalizing $10 billion of already-approved wealth to spread around the cash-strapped Golden State.
So the California political establishment is furiously racing down the alphabet, trying to sell the electorate on plan B, plan C…whatever it takes.
Plan B isn’t faring so well. Last week Governor Brown announced a revised construction program reducing the official price tag to $68 billion by making use of existing train track in the vicinity of Los Angeles and San Francisco—track incapable of supporting high-speed travel, by the way—and connecting fewer cities.
Ignoring for a moment the absurdity of spending $68 billion for a brand new train system where the only high-speed attributes are the name and aerodynamic locomotive shape, the funding for this latest installment of what the California High-Speed Rail Authority [sic] proudly headlines as “California’s Green Future” remains as elusive as ever.
Enter another utopian program of the future: The California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 (AB32). AB32 mandates reducing California’s greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. Authority for making this happen, by any means necessary, apparently, is conferred on the California Air Resources Board (CARB), which is preparing a cap-and-trade market to permit the state’s dwindling number of industrial companies to emit “pollutants,” as innocuous carbon dioxide is now euphemized in the local press. Since CO2 emissions are a surrogate for energy consumption, this amounts to a tax on energy, with the rate set by unelected bureaucrats to achieve a meaningless and arbitrary aggregate level.
Which brings us to Plan C: Why not use cap-and-trade revenue from the AB32 energy control program to subsidize construction of the Slow Bullet Train to Nowhere? The San Jose Mercury News reports.
The latest proposal refers repeatedly to the possibility of tapping money from California's new cap-and-trade program. That plan, which is set to begin in November, requires companies to buy permits from the state to offset their annual greenhouse gas emissions. It was part of California's landmark 2006 global warming law, which aims to reduce those emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.
Companies that are able to meet their emission limits—the cap—can sell credits to companies that cannot. Numerous experts have said the money funneled to the state as fees must be used to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
High-speed rail officials say they would only seek to use the cap-and-trade money if other funding sources come up short. So far, California has secured $3.5 billion in federal money and $9 billion in construction bonds approved by voters in 2008, which lawmakers must approve selling.
There's a reason why statist California's unemployment rate remains stubbornly high at 10.9 percent against the national average of 8.3 percent. CARB has been empowered to use taxes and regulation to constrain economic activity in the state in furtherance of a symbolic environmental goal. The revenues from its activities are now being touted as a means of funding another utopian pipe dream: a low-speed "high-speed" rail network. Meanwhile, the consequent lack of economic growth is steepening California's slide into insolvency.
Is Texas still accepting new residents?
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Comments:
May '10
Re: When Utopias Collide: Slow-Speed Rail and the Politics of CO2
George Savage
Is Texas still accepting new residents?
Please leave all political baggage at the door.
Jan '12
Re: When Utopias Collide: Slow-Speed Rail and the Politics of CO2
Wouldn't it be easier and cheaper to build the railroad between two empty places and then build cities at each end?
Re: When Utopias Collide: Slow-Speed Rail and the Politics of CO2
Shhh. You might give someone in the Brown administration the idea for Plan D.
Mar '11
Re: When Utopias Collide: Slow-Speed Rail and the Politics of CO2
I've got a great idea for high-speed travel, that needs no infrastructure between each end - air travel.
I'm a little late, though.
Jul '11
Re: When Utopias Collide: Slow-Speed Rail and the Politics of CO2
The answer lies in who gets the money. It is all graft, kick backs, land swaps and swindles now tied in with eco idiots and the carbon swap crooks.
This will be pushed based on graft. Watch it and weep.
Mar '11
Re: When Utopias Collide: Slow-Speed Rail and the Politics of CO2
Having lived in Germany for 8 years, I have become convinced that there is a place and a time for sensible high-speed rail. But California is not that place, and this is most certainly not the time.
The idea, so prevalent in the American coasts, that enough money and willpower can simply re-create Europe in the U.S. is a fallacy that will lead to our bankruptcy if common sense (such as the concept of population density) does not make a comeback soon.
Apr '11
Re: When Utopias Collide: Slow-Speed Rail and the Politics of CO2
Would it really be so bad if our flag had only 49 stars?
Mar '11
Re: When Utopias Collide: Slow-Speed Rail and the Politics of CO2
My two most detested California boondoggles combined in one composition, surely Mr. Savage you are attempting to drive me into a fury induced seizure.
Apr '11
Re: When Utopias Collide: Slow-Speed Rail and the Politics of CO2
The essential conceit of federal, state, and municipal governments is to look at the accomplishments of the past and assume that they can be easily repeated.
Compare the Golden Gate Bridge to one of Gov. Brown's other publicly funded debacle, the Bay Bridge which continues to eat construction funds and has problems that persist to this day.
Past public projects were nowhere nearly as burdened with regulation and special interests as they are today. MSNBC had a series of commercials praising government as their hosts pointed at government accomplishments. Maddow praised the Hoover dam, noting only government could make that, ignoring that today, the evironmental interests fight dams tooth and nail, and the costs of approving then building a project would become so astronomical it would never be built.
Yesterday we could send a man on the moon. Today we can fill out the forms necessary to propose an exploratory committee to discuss the impact of manned moon missions.
Dec '10
Re: When Utopias Collide: Slow-Speed Rail and the Politics of CO2
George, why do you "hate" progress and why do you "hate" travel? The people of California have a right to enjoy the benefits and freedom of high speed train service. Only conservatives would trample on the right of all Californians to travel. #OccupyHighSpeedTrains
May '10
Re: When Utopias Collide: Slow-Speed Rail and the Politics of CO2
California long ago became the land of mass insanity. Look at what we've done only recently: re-elected 70's leftist relics Barbara Boxer and Jerry Brown - if the voters can do that, why wouldn't they vote for exorbitantly expensive toy trains?
Why is it that progressives are always looking to the past for the schemes they wish to impose on the rest of us? Trains were a great idea - in the 19th century. Their idea of housing seems always to be Greenwich Village 1920 - tenements where we're stacked atop one another like sardines in a can - but no sprawl!
Let me alone with a little sprawl and a private automobile, please, and we can continue to be a prosperous society.
Re: When Utopias Collide: Slow-Speed Rail and the Politics of CO2
DocJay: The answer lies in who gets the money. It is all graft, kick backs, land swaps and swindles now tied in with eco idiots and the carbon swap crooks.
This will be pushed based on graft. Watch it and weep. · 5 hours ago
Well put. The calculation seems to be to do whatever is necessary to keep the money-go-round spinning until 1) the next election and--a stretch goal--2) the politicians in question retire for good. Any actual useful public infrastructure coming out the end of the sausage machine (mixing my metaphors with wild abandon today) will be an incidental bonus.
Oct '11
Re: When Utopias Collide: Slow-Speed Rail and the Politics of CO2
I'm thinking 52. There's nothing wrong with California that breaking it into three states wouldn't fix.
Well, ok, maybe it's not a complete solution, but it'd be a great start. Maybe even be a necessary start. It's hard to conceive of any long-term solution to California's fundamental malaise as long as its natural advantages so greatly overbalance normal human morality and intelligence.
Feb '12
Re: When Utopias Collide: Slow-Speed Rail and the Politics of CO2
Wisconsin was smart enough in 2010 to stop the same Choo-Choo train folly by electing Walker vs. Barret. Barret and the crony ex-Gov Doyle tried to sell the same thing. I believe the Choo-Choo was a sign of times, that we in the Great White North were able to dispel and get the public to rally support, in making sure the likes of future Gov.Walker and future Sen. Johnson to gain the upper hand.
Oct '10
Re: When Utopias Collide: Slow-Speed Rail and the Politics of CO2
The American power lobby decided decades ago to choose death rather then life. Since the late 60's we have been in a death spiral as a nation. The sausage machine is grinding away at what remains of Christian morality.
If the is no God, then there is no foundation for morality. Go ahead kiddies, make it up as you go. And so we do.
When my children were little I used to tell them that they must decide what they will do if the store clerk gives them an extra $20 bill. And, they must decide that now, before they actually have to. In the actual event, we will decide the most convenient choice, God be damned.
Welcome, America, to your result. And do not think that it is only others who are choosing it.
Re: When Utopias Collide: Slow-Speed Rail and the Politics of CO2
So true. As the military likes to say, "you don't rise to the occasion, you default to your training." I used to occasionally participate as a guest lecturer in an entrepreneurship class at a famous graduate school of business. My most essential point: If you want to be ethical, start practicing right now with the little things and expect that this posture will cost you many millions of dollars over the medium to long term.
Too few people see any reason to be ethical, perhaps, as you suggest, because they are unacquainted with the Author of the universe.