Precisely. History has demonstrated that attempting to reshape human nature from the top down, using means up to and including killing off a third of the population, just doesn’t work.
Where did that come from? I’m talking about a few new land-use restrictions, plus development of regional commuter-rail and light-rail networks and a national high-speed rail network. How do you go from that to gulags and death-camps and artificial famines?
Brainglutton,
You might be interested to look into history of land use planning in Oregon, specifically the creation of LCDC (Land Conservation & Development Commission) by then Governor Tom MacCall in SB 100.
(http://bluebook.state.or.us/cultural/history/history28.htm)
For an overview of the law, 1000 Friends of Oregon has an overview or you can read through the Oregon Administrative Rules
Yes, I’m very familiar with the recent history of comprehensive land-use planning in Oregon, especially the Portland area. My point is that the whole country needs to learn from Oregon’s example. Their approach to the problem seems to be working.
Federal projects get derailed and delayed by lawsuits just like any other, especially when it’s a multi-State impacting project. TVA is still quasi-governmental (moreso that people think) and it still gets sued over something about once a month or so (I’m an expert witness in one suit so I won’t talk much on that…). Yucca Mountain, for example. See also the Federal Transit Administration being sued over light rail in Seattle. What exactly is your basis for thinking a Federal mass transit project will not suffer from nuisance lawsuits that will raise the cost to make it prohibitive?
Basically, what it would take is a Federal project that contains legislation which enacts spot tort reform to protect that project and that project alone. Which still does not mean it will not be challenged in court, and if a Federal judge issues a stay on it, then it’s going to go and slog through the courts until the appeals run out or the USSC rules on it.
Actually, I’m revising my last statement. If the people want mass transit to succeed in the US, they’d better start backing Constitutional-level sweeping tort reform.
Making fuel from non-petroleum projects is pretty old technology; the Germans made gas & diesel fuel from coal during WWII, and South Africa did the same thing during apartheid. You can pretty much make oil from almost any source of hydrogen & carbon. The reason you don’t see more synthetic fuels is that they have been more expensive than drilling it out of the ground, thus you only see the technology being used by nations that couldn’t get a hold of oil due to war/political reasons.
Increasing oil prices & improvements in the technology are making it more practical - a new process called
Thermal Depolymerization has been developed, that greatly increases the effiecency of the process - right now, for every 100 barrels of oil produced, only 15 are needed to fuel the process. A small plant using this was recently built in Missouri next to the Butterball Turkey plant, and is currently turning turkey guts into fuel oil. Technology like this could turn everything from agricultural waste to plastics to sewage into usable fuel.
Though it will take a lot of investing and building of new plants over the coming years to make a sizeable dent in our oil consumption, I would think that building a bunch of these plants all over the nation would be cheaper than the massive railway projects, and wide scale efforts to alter the fundamental infastructure this country has built up over the last 70 years.
The first plant cost $20 million to build(and that was after problems with a bad contractor), and puts out 200 barrels a day. Now, this is just the first plant; if say, future plants cost $10 million and puts out 500 barrels a day we would need 40,000 plants to replace the 20 million barrels of oil the USA uses daily; this would cost $400 billion dollars. Pricey, but if you spread this out over a decade or two, the per year cost wouldn’t be too bad. And people would get to keep their lifestyles completely intact. And you could feed the sewage into the system, solving that problem, and making a profit off of it to boot.
What is the starter material for that process? Is it something not derived from fossils?
The Germans and South Africans were using coal - with todays techniques, you could use turkey guts(like that plant in Missouri is doing right now), waste plastic, lawn clippings, sewage, and so on. Almost anything organic will work.
I do think that the federal government can play a role in this issue. They could set up a national “think tank” of civil engineers and other planning experts that could study the issue and advise new developments in this regard. They could provide incentives–tax breaks, federal funds–for developments that attempt to reduce automobile dependence. They could, more than anything, support the idea publicly, encouraging people to take advantage of opportunities to reduce their car dependence. It’s not much, but it’s something.
Ultimately, I don’t think it is going to be very fruitful. I think our best hope for reducing the damage being done by automobiles is alternative energy, and I think a Manhattan Project-style research and development effort on that subject is in order. (No, I don’t think that this is something the market will sort out for itself, at least not before it’s too late.)
BTW, I thought this was an interesting article on sprawl and its effects:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/001/531wlvng.asp?pg=1
And this produces an end-product that can fuel a car? I wonder, is there any reason why this technology is not more widely used? Seems it would render drilling for oil pointless and obsolete – unless there’s some reason why the process of drilling, shipping, and refining oil is still cheaper than the process of turning turkey guts and lawn clippings into gasoline.
Are you thinking along the lines of hydrogen fuel cells, or what?
BG: And this produces an end-product that can fuel a car? I wonder, is there any reason why this technology is not more widely used?
Biodiesel fuels are increasing market share in the US, from half a million gallons in 2000 to fifteen million in 2001, for example. The use of biodiesel as a heating fuel is also growing.
Until recently, availability has been limited and it hasn’t been cost-competitive with petroleum fuels in terms of production. I think these constraints are changing.
Note: the only biofuels I’ve heard tell of are more-or-less ordinary vegetable oils (some biodiesel systems in fact use restaurants’ discarded cooking oils, straight from the fryer). I don’t know of any commercial biofuels made from turkey guts, but it wouldn’t really surprise me.
(A frequently-mentioned side benefit of biofuel is that when it burns it apparently smells like “french fries or popcorn” instead of gasoliney car exhaust. Would turkey-guts biofuel smell like roast turkey? As biofuel use expands, are we going to see a boutique market for “biofuel blending” in order to maximize the deliciousness of the aroma? :))
I don’t know. Figure out how many barrels of oil were consumed for cars and trucks in the US last year and convert that to turkey guts and lawn clippings.
Getting back on track, is your objection to “sprawl” simply related to petroleum consumption? In other words, if, say, hydrogen cars were invented or something, would you still object to developments of single family homes?
Probably, but I would regard the problem as much less important – mostly a quality-of-life issue, with added concern about the number of lives we lose each year to traffic accidents. Important, but not necessarily worth making an issue of in presidential campaigns. (BTW, I do not oppose “developments of single family homes” – unless they are built to a scale that makes a car indispensable for every resident family. Many “New Urbanist” communities such as Kentlands, MD, Celebration, FL, and Seaside, FL, are made up mostly of single-family homes, but they are also built to a more walkable scale than most suburban subdivisions in America have been built since WWII.)
As it stands now, I believe the problem is not merely important but urgent – a national-security issue, as I have repeatedly said. America’s dependence on foreign oil does make the world a more dangerous place.
I do hope, earnestly hope, that someday some team of brilliant engineers will invent a car that runs on some renewable and nonpolluting power source – and that still gives everything we have come to expect from a car in terms of speed, horsepower, pickup, and range-before-refueling-or-recharging. (Anything less would be very hard to sell to the motoring public.) But I’m not optimistic.