Or what’s that F*CKING BANNER AD doing here?
Most regular users have probably already noticed the flashing banner ad at the top of the front page about "freight rail being clean and green" or "freight rail works for the environment". You may have thought, "good", the site is getting ad revenue, or maybe a few of you even clicked the link, saw rail legislation information, and decided it wasn’t for you. GORAIL, the banner’s sponsor, wants to give railroad investors a 25% tax credit. Well, what’s wrong with that you think? After all the ad said it’s "clean and green" and "works for the environment"? Excuse me, but who will really be the big beneficiaries of this tax credit? It’s Big Coal, WalMart, and possibly the NAFTA Super Highway.
This ad upsets me like others have been upset over the Chevron and Glenn Beck ads. I take this personally. As someone who has fought a rail expansion for nine years, I particularly liked the slogan on GORAIL’s info page: "Track Where No Track has Gone Before". Hey, Kossacks , what do you think this means? The proposed DM&E expansion, the issue I followed, had coal trains crossing federal grasslands, state parks, trout streams, and running adjacent to National Parks. Unfortunately, reviewal of rail expansions fall under the ICC Termination Act of 1995, passed under the Gingrich Congress. Many environmentalists believe it violates the federal environmental law, NEPA, because it gives priority to economic issues over environmental ones. And by the way, a rail expansion has never been turned down by the oversight agency, the Surface Transportation Board. Do you want to know what kind of mitigation the board recommended for this project? It mandated running the new train engines by the National Park to limit haze, and run the old polluting engines through more populated regions. You get thoughtful stuff like this from them. Yeah, seeing an ad for "Clean and Green" pushing coal trains irritates me.
So how do I know this "Clean and Green" ad is about coal? Here’s a Reuter’s article from earlier this month:
"The proposed 25 percent investment tax credit has been introduced in both houses of Congress and would be available to shippers and railroads to lay more track, expand tunnels and make other investments to handle more trains at a time when the country's rail network has been strained by rising U.S. imports and soaring demand from utilities for coal."
Coal will be the big beneficiary of this proposed tax credit. Coal currently makes up over 40% of freight, see FRA Report: http://www.fra.dot.gov/...
Last year the electrical utilities testified before congress about their problems with coal deliveries: http://www.basinelectric.com/...
Of course, it was all about their view point; the railroads charge too much and it’s too hard for the utilities to stockpile coal. USA TODAY ran a long article on problems of coal out of the Wyoming mines: it’s bad weather and the inability of the mines to stockpile coal if the trains stop, and the unwillingness of the utilities to stockpile, but never mind those facts: http://www.usatoday.com/...
Congress, loving coal
the way it does, responded with the following bills, from the GORAIL Website: http://www.basinelectric.com/...
Please notice, there is nothing about ethanol here, despite what our banner ad said. That is why the ad is creepy, it‘s trying to disguise the issue. They are going to sell this as good for agriculture and ethanol, but it’s for coal and imported freight.
The Reuter’s article also mentions the need for railroads to haul US imports. It’s about the ability to take container traffic from the west coast, eastwards. Some may consider this a worse reason for tax credits than rail expansion for coal. Major railroads are adding additional track to their existing lines for this west to east traffic, but there is also the possibility of a new north-south railroad as part of the west coast import influx. An aid to the former Republican Congressional Representative in my area, Gutknecht MN-01, first brought this up: he hinted there many be a new line from the Wyoming coal fields up to a canadian railroad. This was couched in terms of avoiding the congestion and unions of the ports in the US west coast, like Oakland and Long Beach. So what he was saying is that goods would be unloaded at a new or existing port in Canada and brought down to the Midwest. This is also one of Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul’s "conspiracy theories", a NAFTA Super Highway. From recent McClatchy News:
Here's what Paul, a GOP presidential candidate, told a New Hampshire audience: "They already have a plan for a highway running from Mexico up to Canada, a 12-lane highway with trains running in the middle. It's going to be an international highway. And there's been some secret funding already into our budgets to start this program moving. There's going to be eminent domain powers used to confiscate tens of thousands of acres to build this."
A federal agency denies this in the article:
"There is absolutely no U.S. government plan for a NAFTA Super highway of any sort," said David Bohigian, an assistant secretary of commerce.
I parse this to read that private companies are going to build a NAFTA Super Highway. It works well with Transportation Secretary Mary Peter’s emphasis on private toll roads.
I am not going to argue that railroads are not more efficient than trucks. But more railroads and more trackage are not the only answer. By subsidizing rail infrastructure, we are subsidizing coal use and our imports. We should instead use precious infrastructure funds for improving transmission lines that can carry power from many sources: coal, wind, methane and biomass. We should work for more sustainable communities instead of hauling in everything imaginable from overseas. The Dkos banner ad brings up ethanol, but it is expensive to ship ethanol by rail. To be cost effective, an ethanol train should travel 350 miles, whereas regular freight, it’s only 150 miles. My former Congressman, Gutknecht,is now backing a pipeline for ethanol so as to avoid ethanol producers being a captive shipper to a railroad. For this reason, states with ethanol need to develop their own local market. This means more E85 pumps and possibly state rebates for ethanol-using vehicles. Before a huge tax credit is passed for rail investors, a lot needs to happen. We need a comprehensive plan for alternative energy, the current railroad laws need to be overhauled, and an investigation needs to happen whether indeed a NAFTA Super Highway is in the works.