Comments on: Today’s Headlines

By: Mark Walker

Mark Walker — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 01:19:44 +0000

Lots of interesting stuff in this week's issue of Business Week: Gas May Finally Cost Too Much Suddenly, It's Cool to Take the Bus Interview with James Howard Kunstler A car-free trifecta -- in a national business publication!

By: mike

mike — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 15:55:02 +0000

“Shea, who retired from teaching in Chicago public schools in June, finds other ways to reduce car use. Now that the weather’s warmer, she walks the seven blocks to a Walgreens instead of driving,…”

You gotta be kidding! Are these people for real? She used to drive 7 blocks to the drug store?

By: Josh

Josh — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 15:49:47 +0000

I take public transportation (subway to NJ Transit) from Brooklyn to visit my parents in NJ. I can’t afford a car, let alone gas. You don’t hear me whining about it.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 15:33:24 +0000

I like this from the Tribune piece:
‘The pain has spread to his personal life. Instead of driving to see his 93-year-old mother on the Near North Side, Malkim takes a bus from the Golf Mill Shopping Center in Niles.

“To visit my mom, I have to take public transportation. I can’t afford the gas anymore,”‘

the pain!

By: Doc Barnett

Doc Barnett — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 15:18:06 +0000

I like like everything but the lede: “The campaign against climate change could be set back by the global food crisis, as foreign populations turn against measures to use foodstuffs as substitutes for fossil fuels.” Growing and then burning our corn based ethanol is not a carbon neutral process. It can’t be described as a tool to fight climate change in the slightest.

Biodiesel (they say) approaches carbon neutrality, but to have any positive effect it would have to help reduce and eventually terminate the burning of fossil fuels. That’s only happening in a very marginal way. (In theory, without a biofuel supply the price of petrol would be higher and the incentive for getting the last drop out of the ground also higher.) No biofuel is part of “campaign against climate change”, they are instead part of a campaign to preserve the transportation status quo in the face of oil prices that are rising on their own. The only thing that will significantly reduce CO2 production faster than the natural expiration of supply is to directly price up the burning of fossil fuels with international carbon taxes. Environmentalists need to get OFF the biofuel bandwagon definitively and publicly. It will continue on without them of course, but as an openly amoral enterprise.

By: justin

justin — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 14:43:43 +0000

It’s good that the police can now carry machine guns in the subway, since their regular guns were clearly incapable of controlling terrorism, as evidenced by the widespread rash of subway bombings in New York over the last 6 years.

I’d obviously rather be safe than not, but I think DHS has more money than they know what to do with right now.

By: mike

mike — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 14:10:47 +0000

Machines guns which will do absolutely do nothing to stop terrorism. But they will make people afraid, and further militarize our society.

Straight out of the playbook.

By: Glenn

Glenn — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 13:50:18 +0000

I hope our elected officials are starting to piece together the big picture on the driving -> ethanol -> food prices -> food riot -> starving linkage. Poor people in Haiti and other countries are starving because we are now growing food (with heavy fossil fuel inputs) to burn in our cars as ethanol fuel.

Another way to think of this is that “progressives” like Weprin, Weiner and Brodsky et al are helping people who have transit alternatives in the far outboroughs and suburbs drive/steal food from the poorest people in the world.

I really hope “progessives” start getting up the courage to tell their constituents to sacrifice a little convenience for the sake of the planet and those most vulnerable to the costs of our auto-dependence.