John McCain and his agenda on Amtrak

For years, McCain, in the comfort of cheap gasoline for autos and airplanes, made Amtrak a personal whipping boy. Despite the fact that governments in Western Europe and Asia zoomed far ahead of the United States by supporting high-speed trains to relieve congestion, promote tourism and now as we are coming to know, save the planet, McCain has spent considerable capital in denying the passenger rail system the capital to modernize.

In 2000, when he was chairman of the Senate Science, Commerce and Transportation committee, McCain killed $10 billion in capital funding for Amtrak. He denounced Amtrak as a symbol of government waste, claiming, "There's only two parts of the country that can support a viable rail system - the Northeast and the far West."

<snip>

In the section of McCain's website called "reforming our transportation sector," there is no mention of rail. There is only his clean-car challenge to automakers, his $300 million prize to design battery cars, and enforcing only existing gas mileage standards. When The Washington Post reported on how President Bush's fiscal 2006 budget did not include a subsidy for Amtrak, would kill both $20 million for the next generation of high-speed rail, and $250 million for railroad rehabilitation, it quoted McCain as saying on television, "I'm glad the president is coming over with a very austere budget."

The luster of austerity is gone. Public transportation is becoming a real issue for the campaign trail. If so, McCain has all but handed Obama a golden spike to beat him over the head with.

I had hoped all this energy depletion business would take longer, like until I could retire or something. But the WSJ read like the Oil Street Journal this morning. Seems the Fed might have to sacrifice both financial institutions and employment to deal with the oil shocks. And someone had a great headline on a blog, Oil's Disquiet on the Western Front. I've decided to cut expenses now before things get frantic.

After eleven years at the same office, I had to leave the hinterlands to find work in the big city. My apartment costs three times as much as our mortgage, but I can walk to the office, and it is a better place to work. My wife is with me this week, but usually I drive three hours nearly every weekend to visit her and my daughter.

Currently in play are the swim club membership (I can run and bike for free), internet access (the office connection is faster anyway), the web page (I haven't touched it in over a year), unlimited long distance (use more email), and one or two driving weekends per month (two would be hard, but the gasoline bills are fierce).

And the discretionary spending has to stop. Amazon and Barnes & Noble are out, thrift stores and used bookstores are in. I'll have to cut back on restaurant food, too. I love this Mexican place called Elvis. They make a burrito as big as a loaf of bread. I'll be eating more salad - caesar salad w/o tomatoes.

These are hardly earth-shattering sacrifices - I'm nowhere near the point of choosing between food and heat - but it seems to be time to get ready for sacrifices.

A Critique of Reinventing Collapse

Smith echoes my theme that the FSU collapse was more political than the energy depletion collapse that looms for the world:

The U.S. will be dealing with an entirely different set of problems: systemic financial crisis/collapse, and shortages in resources that were once abundant: food, energy and water (at least in the West). Those limitations in resources present problems beyond mere political corruption and incompetence, though we have still have an abundance of those. In other words, if the U.S. faces a bigger challenge, it's because the problems are far deeper than just political structure.

Why the Oil Industry Benefits from Bottled Water Sales

My wife is stacking plastic water bottles on bamboo poles, but we may want to reconsider using them:

Given that 80 percent of the PET (Polyethylene terephthalate) plastic bottles produced in the United States ends up in a Coca-Cola, Pepsi or Nestlé beverage container, people should know the connection that these bottled water producers have with the largest oil, chemical and plastic corporations on the planet. Let's see who is profiting from supplying oil-based plastic to the bottled water industry and how the players in this supply chain are some of the worst environmental polluters of our time.

Why Oil and Wages Don’t Mix

Ben Stein opines that if our wages had kept pace, oil prices would sting so much:
 

The problem comes in another, staggering set of government numbers. (Economists argue about the validity of using these numbers over long periods, but they capture the sorrow of the situation.) Get this, friends: from 1947 to about 1973 - from the days from the great Harry S. Truman to the great Richard M. Nixon - real hourly pay for nongovernment workers rose by about 40 percent. The peak year was the one before R.N. left for San Clemente in 1974. Since then, real wages both hourly and weekly for all nongovernment workers, on average, have fallen by about 5 percent, very roughly.