Yesterday we hopped into the car, drove an hour, and the caught the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority line into downtown to see Widespread Panic play at the Bank of America pavilion on the Boston waterfront.
I found a lot of allegory betwixt our trip, the current economic situation we face, and potential solutions. Bear with me as I wax poetic today ...
The run over to Boston from here near Springfield is interesting; an hour by car to Riverside station, a $2.50 toll each way, $3.75 to park, and two $9 day passes for "The T" – the Massachusetts Bay Transport Authority’s subway/bus system. I get about thirty miles to the gallon so we’re talking $20 for fuel plus all of the other costs - $47 for the trip. If one person were going and the timing worked the $55 Amtrak round tripfare from Springfield straight to downtown Boston would be the right thing, but if two or more are involved the car makes sense. Oh, and you’ve got to be willing to kill three hours going the ninety miles by train. Passengers are not a priority on our national rail network.
The T was packed and as we got closer we started meeting fellow show goers – the concert shirts were one clue, but the overall happy, excited vibe is a sure giveaway. I find the T to be a frustrating photographic environment – target rich, but the lighting seems contrived to torment the would be photographer armed only with a point and shoot camera. I’m also frustrated by the lack of access – sure, it’s good for metro Boston, but where is the rail/bus system for the Springfield area? I want to go to Boston and not have to drive more than a couple of miles in the process.
Boston’s Bank of America pavilion is a striking venue – a former shipyard converted to open air concert hall duty. I’m glad for a concert venue ... but it strikes me as problematic that there are a lot of soon to unemployed mortgage brokers who could use some work ... and our ocean going vessels are as likely to be built in Imabari or Karachi as domestically.
I found the display outside the venue to be complete appropriate for the world today, with the only reason Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac survive is that We, The People just got volunteered to bail them out after they sucked up all of the toxic waste mortgages from the various scams that have been run here in the United States. Bank of America is a particularly high visibility player – they’re buying Countrywide to conceal their exposure to Countrywide’s poor business practices. They aren’t imploding ... today ... but keep watching them; in fact, you can just skip over to the Bank Implode-o-meter and see a nice, tidy scoreboard of it all, or scoot over to the Credit Writedowns blog for a nice timeline of how it all fits together.
I’ve known since last August that things were going to get really grim and with the current moves on Fannie and Freddie July seems to be the month. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has basically just volunteered us (that’s you and me, along with every other taxpayer) to keep them afloat ... and for the last year or so they’ve been vacuuming up all of the junk mortgages that were on various lending institutions’ books. We have been knowingly defrauded in this and there is no way out without wrecking the dollar even more than it already has been.
So what we face on the economic, energy, and environmental front is pretty easily summed up:
So ... what can we do to address all three of those issues? You all know A. Siegel’s work on Energize America 2020 and he is currently forming up the unfortunately named Freshman Energy Smart Acceleration (FESA) Act, which I’m told is getting a fun, new label shortly ... one particular point in this plan caught my eye.
Energy Smart Rail
The FESA Energy Smart Rail (ESR) Act would seek to spark private industry to invest to transition the US rail system to all electric. $1 billion / year initiative to spark private investment in electrification of rail system. (This would make the Federal commitment in the range of 10% of the total cost. Note, for that, reduction of US oil demand by 500,000 or more barrels per day by 2020 ... roughly 2.5% of US current demand.) $100 million/year in additional funding for research and development support for using the electrified rail system for a HVDC grid across the country. $50 million in funding for rail energy related research.
Now ... you can read all sorts of crazy ideas on blogs ... for example I won't give RedState any traffic by linking to "hot gas" lawsuit foolishness, but this one is different.
The driving force behind this portion of the plan is Alan Drake, a rail electrification activist, but a special sort of actvisit - a large scale engineering project manager and a survivor of Hurricane Katrina. He knows what climate change means for the people on his street. Alan and I got a chance to hang out a bit face to face right before Christmas last year ...
Alan moves in a bit different circles than we do. The Association for the Study of Peak Oil gathered a good bit of money from a conference last year ... and directed it to Alan for use in a financial model developed in conjunction with The Millenium Institute. His thoughts on rail electrification are backed by top notch economic modeling.
So among the many "silver BBs" A. Siegel nudges along I feel this one in particular merits some attention. What can we do, as a group, to help A. Siegel and Alan Drake move this forward? Can we get a quorum together for a weekly rail electrification discussion? Maybe form a Google group to promote diaries on the subject? Would folks be willing to add a link to it to their tag lines?