Tag: Living Energy Independence

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence , crossposted from The Hillbilly Report

It is widely remarked that the US Department of Transport map of High Speed Rail Corridors leaves a lot of obvious holes.

Often, this reflects a misunderstanding of what the DoT is mapping. This is not a “Master Plan”. There is no HSRail planner division inside the Federal Rail Administration inside the Department of Transport that is working away at deciding which corridor should be added to the corridor.

Instead, what they have mapped are the corridors that are eligible for HSRail funding. The way that things are set up is that a state or group of states do some planning, petition Congress be designated as a HSRail corridor, or added to a corridor, or for less sweeping changes petition the Department of Transport to revise an existing corridor, and {*voila*}, that’s a designated corridor.

Morris says he and his tag-team High Speed Rail partner Ed Glaeser … that’s HSR or #HSrail for short … are taking at least a one week break. So Robert Samuelson steps into the breach.

He repeats the old familiar argument:

• (1) Amtrak requires operating subsidies.
• (2) Rail operators overseas had the same problem.
• (3) Rail operators overseas found out that increasing the speed solved the problem.
• (4) So if we do the same thing, it will lose money.

Why does (4) follow from (1), (2), and (3)? It doesn’t, of course, its just guilt by association given the form and shape of an argument to allow intellectually dishonest rhetoric to pass as if it were real argument.

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

Freakonomist Eric Morris finishes up his tag-team attack with Ed Glaeser on the HSR policy with a post that confesses to the hack jobs both are doing on HSR policy – but works hard to spin the confession into a defense of the hackery.

Eric Morris’s efforts have been clearly the weaker of the two, to the point where Ryan Avent, who wrote blog posts to pick apart the analytical flaws of Ed Glaeser’s four part series as well as the first posts by Eric Morris, responded to Eric Morris’ last effort via twitter:

@ryanavent: Eric Morris closes HSR series by referring readers to Randal O’Toole. You know, in case you thought he and Glaeser were aiming for an honest critique

The main takeway point from below?

So the bait and switch is as follows. By overstating the costs and understating the benefits of Express HSR, “it costs too much”, or is only useful in a very few special cases, and therefore we cannot afford its “transformative benefits”. And by ignoring the fact that the benefit of investing in Emerging HSR is greater than the cost, and focusing on dismissing the quality of the benefits, the Emerging HSR is “unworthy” of investment because it is not “transformative” enough.

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

I’ve seen this before … indeed, it was mentioned recently in some discussion threads of Libertarians Against Choice … the effort to play divide and conquer by arguing “if it doesn’t go 220mph, it isn’t worth doing”.

John Hilkevitch of the Chicago Tribune asked last Monday Are 110mph trains on the right track? (secondary link – I’m having trouble with the primary), establishing at the outset the false frame that 110mph and 220mph trains are two different “tracks” and we have to choose between them.

This is, of course, nonsense. Indeed, the first generation of bullet trains were 125mph trains, which is the second tier of the three-tier Department of Transport system.

However, there may be more going on here than just the run of the mill “make stuff up based on my uninformed reaction without finding out the facts” that seems to dominate the op-ed pages.

Burning the Midnight Oil for the Arc of the Sun, xposted to Agent Orange, 7pm EDT

I guess its natural, as an advocate for transport cycling and for transport systems like High Speed Rail, light rail, and Quality Buses that support cycle transport, that among the enemies of our long term national interest, I tend to focus on the Oil Patch and their allies.

But, what would our economy be like if we didn’t study war no more?

Consider just official Federal Defense Spending, in 2005 dollars and as a Percent of GDP (to closest 0.1%) (BEA):

• 1995: $476.8b, 5.2%
• 2000: $453.5b, 4.0%
• 2005: $589.0b, 4.7%
• 2008: $659.4b, 5.0%

You can see right there why it was necessary to have Bush rather than Gore elected as President in 2000, and why the two candidates on the Democratic side in favor of expanding the size of the army were the two finalists in the Democratic primary contest to clean up for the mess that Bush made of things.

Direct Federal spending on “Defense” goods and services was heading south of 4%, and that could not be tolerated.

Crossposted from The Hillbilly Report, crossposted to Agent Orange

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

Ryan Avent has provided high quality debunking of many of the flaws of Ed Glaeser’s ongoing analysis of Cost and Benefits of HSR. His current piece, Ed Glaeser’s Rail Fail, does not let us down.

Hell, I decided I’d read Ryan Avent’s piece first, before reading Glaeser, so I would not get riled up and start a long rant, only to find that Ryan has explained it more clearly … and to more total readers, to boot.

But I got riled up anyway. Ed Glaeser in the most recent piece comes out with a blatant lie, and one that’ll trap almost all casual readers.

Last Thursday, John McCarron in an op-ed at the Chicago Tribune used the excuse of “skepticism” to trot out slopping thinking and laziness about digging up facts, in Slow down those fast-train dreams

Among many “God, I want to file a bug report” passages in a fairly short piece is:

The purpose of high-speed rail, near as I can tell, is not to ease the daily commute of millions of Chicagoans — we’ll still clank along on what is, in many places, a century-old system — but to rocket a much smaller group of occasional travelers to places like St. Louis, Detroit and Minneapolis at speeds approaching 220 m.p.h. Two hours to St. Louis! All we’ll need is a reason to go there.

So, (1) McCarron frames local transport and regional transport as either/or tasks … we either do one or we do the other. Unlike any other time in our nation’s history, we are unable to address both.

And (2) McCarron likes his opinions unadulturated by fact. The 220mph Express HSR project is in California. The actual projects that the states of Illinois, Missouri, Michigan, Indiana and Ohio are requesting funding for are in the “Emerging HSR” tier of HSR … trains running at 110mph.

Perhaps there is a recipe for being “provocative” when you do not, after all, want to depart from the economic mainstream – despite the radical incapacities that have come to prominence in the last year – and do not want to upset powerful vested interests.

If I was trying to use Eric Morris’ “Freakonomics Blog” piece for the NYTimes, High-Speed Rail and CO2, to work the recipe out, my guess would be:

• Pick a challenge to the status quo as your target
• Pick a sexy public issue as your line of attack
• Narrow the frame to bias the case in favor of the status quo
• cherry pick information sources that are biased toward your desired conclusions
• mis-state as much of the rest of the evidence as required to bring your conclusion home
  

So let’s see this recipe at work as Eric Morris does a hack piece trying to argue that HSR funding is bad for CO2 emissions.

H/T to Rafeal at the California HSR Blog for bringing this piece to my attention.

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

Dan Walters in the Sacramento Bee asks:

Is this the time to launch construction of a high-speed railroad line between Northern and Southern California that will cost at least $40 billion, much of it from bonds to be repaid from a state budget that’s already gushing red ink?

Yes, say its fervent advocates, contending that a bullet train, similar to those in Europe and Japan, will reduce air and auto congestion, reduce greenhouse gases and generate many billions of dollars in economic benefits.

Dan Walters then throws all the complaints about the California HSR project he can find into a big pot, and stirs. Underneath the individual “points”, lies the main New Hooverist thesis … in hard times, we cannot afford to invest in the future.