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Bringing Trains into the “Energy Mix”
Monday, June 14, 2010
In a Washington Post Business section column yesterday, economic policy expert Ezra Klein drives home a truth that is unwelcome to many Americans: gasoline in the U.S. is actually too cheap because prices do not account for the societal and environmental costs associated with its use. The Gulf oil disaster is one of the more visible externalities (to use the economist’s term) of the oil market.
Klein quotes Ian Perry of the think tank Resources for the Future: “We’re pretty much stuck with our dependency on oil. We don’t have any substitutes. Even if we hugely increase the price on oil, we’d only have limited impact on it. People need to drive and get to work.” Therein lies the flaw in the thinking of those who look at Big Oil as the only problem: it’s not just oil that we are over-dependent on—the U.S. cannot maintain its addiction to driving.
To simply switch to a cleaner, greener fuel source while continuing to consume energy at our present rates would be impossible—we can’t generate that much energy from renewables within a workable time frame. We need to get serious about using less energy, and there’s no getting around the gross ineffeciency inherent in a transportation system that is so unilaterally oriented towards motor vehicles. As Dr. Wolfgang Meyer, who studied the question of “green fuels,” concludes, the amount of infrastructure needed to power the current U.S. auto fleet on renewables is off-the-charts impossible.
A world-class passenger train system—intercity trains connected with local and regional transit supporting walkable, bikeable communities—can move Americans quickly and comfortably using a small fraction of the energy that our mobility currently consumes. Trains must be a key component of the “clean-energy future” President Obama is advocating. We must take every opportunity to remind our elected officials to make it so.
—Malcolm Kenton