tandempower

Every acre of land that's not yet developed is populated by natural ecosystems that are working overtime for no pay to absorb CO2 out of the atmosphere and clean/filter rainwater before it becomes the water supply.

KraneXL

I am aware.

But the damage was done 100 years ago when Henry Flagler built the RR all the way down to Key West. The second black eye was abandoning that route mid-century in lieu of building an additional highway right next to it. The path is already there. Lets just update it.

fietsbob

Rail dont sell pickup trucks fueled by oil from Texas Companies , & their refineries ..

tandempower

I believe there is a rail project going on currently, but it is being built within the highway corridor, I think. Many of the old rail corridors have been converted into bike paths, which is better than having trains. Trains would be great, but until the general public is ready to get around without driving, they're not going to work the way they should. There is a pro-automotive, anti-change culture that actively resists transportation reform. There are well-funded political lobbying groups that actively fight against efforts to reduce sprawl because they claim that the suburban drive-everywhere lifestyle is the American Dream and environmentalists who want land-use and transportation reforms are anti-American. Of course it's the opposite, that the automotive culture has promoted the destruction of land and disempowerment of the people by imprisoning them spending sedentary time in motor vehicles, but the propaganda is too good at convincing people that driving is power and debt is wealth.


Yes, it is extremely difficult to convince people to keep the fossil fuels in the ground. People just think that Greta Thunberg and others who are outspoken about climate are brainwashed. They have totally rigidified against climate reform while scientists and their believers have only continued building on what they know.

Mobile 155

Climate change is little more than a rallying cry to try and convince people that the life people are living now is bad and what they suggest somehow will change things. . Even assuming climate change is taking place there is no reason to believe the methods to fix it will work. Rail or any other form of transportation has to find a way to stand on its own and not continually calling upon the magic words to justify it.

Some me may say we only have so many years to fix it but do people even know if it can be fixed and that the solutions suggested will reverse anything? They used to believe tossing children and young women into volcanoes would effect the weather but that didn’t help. We have had at least five heating cooling periods on the earth and most of them are pre-industrial so until someone knows how the others were reversed how can we believe they can stop this one?

Now it it comes down to what the people want and prefer and if that is sprawl either by people or jobs that is how it is supposed to be. Living like the Amish so future generations can live like that till the next ice age just can’t be proven by science. As long as we have the resources we should use them. If we have to develop other resources then we can do that as well but the earth has survived well over 4.5 billion years mostly without us it will do fine now. Remember the dinosaurs live a sustainable life and where are they today. And they didn’t live in dense cities or take the train. That is a modern problem.

Rollfast

Must be not enough time to pitch woo and neck.

Rollfast

Wyoming and the Dakotas.

KraneXL

HSR is much more about an alternative to air travel than it is to driving. So you wouldn't be giving up your car anymore than you would if you chose to fly. HSR is those who would choose to drive but only because they don't want to fly.

cooker

I know you aren't changing your position so I only respond for the benefit of other readers. The notion that "Rail or any other form of transportation has to find a way to stand on its own" is a joke. You seem to be in favor of leaving the massive subsidies that all other forms of transportation receive in place, and in this thread at least, only expecting rail to meet that standard. If we did implement the policy that transportation investments and costs must be recovered from users, rail would be a lot more successful than highways. Even the purported defense function of the interstates could be well handled by rail, as Russia showed when they moved all their heavy industry to the far east in WW-II by rail. A rail network could have been built far faster and more cheaply than the interstate, and thus with far less initial and ongoing taxpayer burden, even with a lot more routes. Yes, and we used to believe people could drive as much as they want and and there would be no harm done. It's true the earth has natural cooling and heating cycles, but we are adding more volatility to the system so the changes will occur more severely and rapidly than before. The "solution" is to do less of the disrupting behaviours.You are touching on the exact problem. Of course the world will do fine without us. It's not the "do fine" part that needs to be addressed, it's the "without us" part that is a concern. I'm sure the Romans and the Mycenaeans and the pre-Columbian meso-Americans all had your laissez-faire attitude before their civilizations disastrously collapsed, but at least we have a lot more advance warning than they did, so it's it too bad if we ignore it. The dinosaurs' sustainable lives went on tens or hundreds of millions of years, and it took an extreme external event to disrupt it. We're giving ourselves a far shorter time line than they had and we're creating the cause of our own disaster.

Mobile 155

Dude you will not be here in 100 years. If you have kids they will not be here in 200 years. You don’t know what will happen next week. What if Yellowstone explodes? What if Korea nukes us? What if the San Andreas fault goes? You say we are creating our own disaster but you cannot promise your supposed cure will cure anything.

11,000 years ago there was an ice bridge between Russia and Alaska. There were no cars and no industrial smoke stacks melting that ice bridge back then. The earth warmed all on its own, again I might add. So unless you are 100 percent sure nature has “nothing” to do with climate change then how can you be sure you can change it? You cannot you can only hope and wish man has the power to control the climate.

According to the scientists and the politicians they are working for we have 11 years to reverse the trend. The same scientists say we are between ice ages and over due for another one. We don’t know if another ice age will be better do we?

We will survive or we will not and we do not have the power to do much about it. Just think what would happen if the polls flipped like they once did.

I often hear people preaching about sustainability and a lifestyle that supports it. Well explain Neanderthal man and what happened? Where are the Clovis people? I say again nature wins every time. No matter how many rain dances you do nature wins.

You up can build a train and you can build a hut in Florida but if nature tosses a curve ball at you think Neanderthal and Clovis. That is how I see it anyway.

tandempower

The highway system is about much more than military readiness or even facilitating commerce for domestic interests. It is about maintaining the US economy as a way for global investors to make money. Right now the tariffs are causing some difficulty in selling cars into the US, but that is not so different from when the transoceanic slave trade was stopped. We have replaced the slave economy with a machine economy, but it turns out there are still problems with it - problems that people don't want to face for the same reasons they didn't want to see the slave economy end, i.e. because it makes life easy and lucrative to sell productivity to producers and then use the proceeds to pay for what gets produced.


Humans are part of the ongoing evolution of the Earth. We just have to see the effects we cause in the same light as naturally-caused events and modify them accordingly. We can adapt our activities to be in harmony with the natural sustainability of the planet or we can continue to convert resources that take a long LONG time to develop into energy that serves a fleeting purpose for a brief moment and puts a few more bucks in someone's pocket.

Either way, we will have to wait a long LONG time for the resources we use to be replenished naturally. And all the land we clear for roads and pavement and sprawl are going to obstruct natural carboniferous growth from recurring until something happens to restore that ground to its naturally fertile and prolific state, which is how carbon gets re-absorbed into solid/condensed/non-gaseous form.

FiftySix

Humans are ants and the earth is our ant pile.

There is nothing to slow our exponential growth in population. We are an infestation that keeps growing and consuming. Wars and plagues are but a speed bump.

We probably could use some Amdro to keep things in check, but who gets to pick where to pour the Amdro?

I guess I'll settle for another meteor strike to save the planet from us.

Lemond1985

I bet you'd love this movie, if you haven't seen it:

FiftySix

I almost didn't make it past that horrible intro music. That Dr. Hellstrom puts you on the edge of your seat.

Mobile 155

That is something we have touched on many times. Population growth is already at a point where the earth cannot provide food and water for everyone of the 7.3 billion people. No way can we feed 9 billion by 2030 and 11 billion by 2050 is out of the question.

As it was mentioned a disaster had to take place to wipe out the dinosaurs. A pandemic wiped out 25 to 40 percent of Britain with the Black Plague. We may breed ourselves out of existence. But still most people seem to agree that most of that extra 2 billion population growth will come from countries that simply cannot feed or provide water to their people. Once mass migration starts mass die offs cannot be far behind. Nothing we do in California of Texas or Florida with transportation will change anything in China, India or Africa.

Add to that a population under stress is far more likely to start a pandemic. Transportation will not solve that either. So we might as well enjoy a successful comfortable life while we can. Nothing lasts forever.

Rollfast

Don't count on ridesharing though...https://www.idahostatesman.com/news/...230284544.html

Uber's IPO was pathetic and Lyft is tanking.

KraneXL

You're being obtuse Mobile 155. Unless you have a better idea, its time to stop fighting the solutions and listen to reason.

Fact is, mass transportation is a whole lot more efficient and less of an impact on the environment than individual transportation means.

Remember, "if you're not a part of the solution, you're part of the problem."

Mobile 155

If I am to believe the UN and several others then 7.3 billion people defy a HSR solution. If population studies are to be believed trying to solve the problems of sustainability while ignoring the number one concern is spitting in the wind. I have posted the study I took this quote from before. “A 2009 study of the relationship between population growth and global warming determined that the “carbon legacy” of just one child can produce 20 times more greenhouse gas than a person will save by driving a high-mileage car, recycling, using energy-efficient appliances and light bulbs, etc”.

If we cannot now feed 7.3 billion people how will spending 77 to 100 billion on a train fix anything? You can believe what you want to believe but I have found very few sites that indicate we can lower our human consumption to s sustainable point by changing our transportation habits. Think of another 2 billion people by 2030? How many bullet trains will it take to feed those people? Where is the drinkable water going to come from?

My stated belief is we have reached the tipping point years ago. Anything we do other than addressing run away population is busy work as the ship sinks. Unless some new technology of some super GMOs and ways of getting water from the ocean are solved nothing else will matter.

We we are at 7.3, we will be at 9 billion in about 11 years. We have no HSR that can be finished in 11 years and even if it were what difference will it make to the climate?
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.liv...h-support.html

Think of it as a human comet hitting the earth. Do you have reason to believe you are part of the solution by supporting HSR?

These are simply thoughts and debates based on what one group thinks is the biggest problem verses another. I have even read a UN report saying we need to reduce the population to 4 billion people. How do they think that will happen when the west is close to zero population growth?

Not it going to happen in one or two generations I am thinking and the HSR will not be a factor in the salvation of sustainability. My option anyway.

tandempower

His whole belief centers on the idea that population beyond a certain level is unsustainable regardless, so there's no point in trying to solve the problem of higher population. Basically he's just a Malthusian waiting for enough people to die off and not be replaced so that people can be free to drive and live in suburbs or whatever without worrying about what effects that might have on the ability of humans to go forth and multiply, so to speak. He sort of reminds me of Thanos from the most recent Avengers movies, but maybe that's because I saw Endgame recently and it's fresh in my memory.

Mobile 155

I have posted referenced studies and UN opinions and you respond with a comic book movie? Well ok we live in a different world. If I am to except the studies on climate change should I not take into account the same people suggesting population is by far the greatest contributor? Of should I look to the MCU and other movies for guidance?

tandempower

You say 'comic book movie' as if that somehow prevents it from accurately depicting a certain Malthusian mindset, which you share. The comic book movies with Thanos are certainly not realistic in any believable sense, but the character Thanos holds a simple, logical perspective that if the population was half its current size, it would solve poverty because there would be twice as much to go around for the survivors.

Basically it is the view that the world has fixed limits to its carrying capacity for population and that those problems can't be solved until the population shrinks to a sustainable size. Isn't that the view you hold?

FiftySix

The idea that humans would share anything equally is a utopian dream.

Back in 1970 the world's population was half its size in 2015 and there was poverty. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population

tandempower

Your changing the subject. Read Mobile155's posts. He thinks the population has to remain below a certain level for problems to be solved. In other words, he thinks once population grows beyond a certain level, people might as well drive and fly and do whatever else they feel like because there is no sustainability achievable anyway.

cooker

From your source article (emphasis added):

This is not to say that lifestyle changes are unimportant;in fact, they are essential, since immediate reductions in emissions worldwide are needed to limit the damaging effects of climate change that are already being documented(Kerr, 2007; Moriarty and Honnery, 2008). The amplifying effect of an individual’s reproduction documented here implies that such lifestyle changes must propagate through future generations in order to be fully effective, and that enormous future benefits can be gained by immediate changes in reproductive behavior

So don't have too many kids, and for the ones you do have, it is critical that you (ie. we) start now to use less carbon per person, and that they continue that behaviour.

I mean it should be obvious. Even if we stabilize population both here and in the developing world, it will be no good if the population continues to consume more resources.

KraneXL

That's easier said than done. What about those groups that still believe its God's commandment for them to multiply like rabbits?