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Rumors were flying that this morning House GOP leaders would unveil their proposal for a multi-year transportation bill funded in part by oil and gas extraction fees, but they revealed no details at their press conference.

Instead, House Transportation Committee Chair John Mica gave a preview, saying the bill will:

• consolidate duplicative parts of the federal transportation system
• shift responsibility to states and local governments to move transportation projects forward
• increase the ability to leverage financial resources
• significantly streamline the process for projects, cutting red tape and federal paperwork

“In the coming weeks, House Republicans will formally introduce an energy & infrastructure jobs bill, and hope to move the legislation through the House before the end of the year,” House Speaker John Boehner announced yesterday.

Back in September, the Speaker let slip that the GOP would like to “link the next highway bill to an expansion of American-made energy production.” Turns out, two House Republicans have already put forth proposals to do just that. Both plans pay for infrastructure investment not with user fees like a gas tax, but with revenues from oil drilling.

Yoking transportation funding to fossil fuel extraction presents a horrific feedback loop. Drill for oil to pay for infrastructure to drive more cars to burn more oil — it’s a recipe to entrench oil dependence in transportation policy in a whole new way.

Very few details have emerged so far about Boehner’s plan. For example, it’s unclear whether House leadership plans to use one of those bills as a guide. Most likely, it will combine the House Transportation Committee’s multiyear transportation reauthorization proposal with some hybrid plan to expand domestic energy production.

This new development is disheartening for anyone who genuinely wants to see a reauthorization pass anytime soon. Congress has been unable to pass one because of polarizing disagreements over funding and complete paralysis when it comes to taking the necessary step of increasing the gas tax. A plan to expand oil drilling, with the Deepwater Horizon disaster still fresh in people’s minds, is bound to be even more controversial. With no chance of passing the Senate or being signed by the president, a bill like this will only serve to distract attention from more realistic proposals to reauthorize the surface transportation program. Besides, the logistics will likely be so complex and the revenues will be far enough in the future that even putting politics aside, the proposal is untenable.

AASHTO reacted positively to the news, however, with executive director John Horsley saying, “It’s encouraging to hear Speaker Boehner express his support for transportation infrastructure investment and we appreciate his commitment to move a bill through the House in the near future.”

With Boehner’s announcement, expanded oil drilling – long a GOP goal – has become a condition for Republican support for adequate funding for the transportation bill. The House-proposed bill had included a one-third cut in funding across the board, which was resoundingly rejected by industry groups, transportation advocates, and Democrats. Several months later, House leadership agreed to raise the funding levels but wouldn’t say where the money would come from. Now we know.

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What do the president of FedEx, the former Director of National Intelligence, and 19 other business and military leaders have in common? They’re urging the U.S. to adopt less oil-intensive transportation habits. They say our national security depends on it.

Retired military officers have joined forces with business tycoons to form the Energy Security Leadership Council. They’re looking for ways to reduce U.S. oil dependence and improve energy security. In 2008, the ESLC released a study detailing the need for the U.S. to shift from a petroleum-based to an electricity-based transportation sector.

Realizing that fuel efficiency and alternative fuels are just two legs of a three-legged stool, the ESLC released a report yesterday, “Transportation Policies for America’s Future,” calling for significant changes in transportation infrastructure [PDF].

America’s transportation network exists almost in a vacuum, the report says, with virtually no connection between how it is designed, how it is funded, and how American families and businesses use it every day. The result is an inefficient system in which system needs are out of alignment with investment, cost is out of alignment with usage, and congestion is threatening to undermine the potential gains associated with recent improvements in vehicle technology and fuel diversification.

The ESLC call for policy shifts including:

• The establishment of national performance metrics, with reduction in oil consumption chief among them, for projects to receive federal funds.
• Create a new federal formula program, totaling 25 percent of annual federal transportation funding, to reduce congestion and encourage “economically justifiable alternatives to single-occupant travel in internal combustion vehicles” in metropolitan areas.
• Create a $5 billion-per-year competitive program with funds available to congested metropolitan areas seeking to implement dynamic tolling, improved traffic signals and payment systems, and public transportation solutions.
• Maintain and improve highway and passenger rail capacity outside of metropolitan areas and along major freight corridors.
• Remove federal restrictions on state tolling of new and existing roads.
• Shift to a VMT fee that “adequately accounts for fuel consumption externalities.”

These aren’t treehugging hippies advocating for these changes. These retired high-ranking military officers and corporate CEOs are convinced that the U.S. addiction to oil is the nation’s Achilles heel. “Hostile state actors, insurgents, and terrorists have made clear their intention to use oil as a strategic weapon against the United States,” they say. “America’s energy security can be fundamentally improved through major reductions in oil demand.”

Last Christmas, an Oregon couple driving with their baby in the backseat followed erroneous GPS instructions and got stranded on wilderness roads in a Cascades snowstorm. Twelve hours later, they had given up hope and taped a farewell video. While a rescue party fortunately was able to save them, they no doubt wished they hadn’t allowed their belief in modern electronics to override their own clear eyes and good instincts.

Their misplaced faith is hardly exceptional. If there is one true religion in the United States, it worships at the altar of Technology. Christian or Jew, Muslim or atheist, we accept this doctrine: that technology provides the main path to improving our lives and that if it occasionally fails, even catastrophically, all it will take is another technology to make everything better.

How else to explain two case studies in modern hubris that now appear to be reaching their denouements: The Deepwater Horizon catastrophe and Toyota’s sudden acceleration debacle.

It is our belief in technology that has for years reassured us, along with oil industry advertising and the promises of the U.S. Minerals Management Service, that drilling offshore -- way offshore -- could be done safely while we kept on refilling our tanks. It has reassured us, along with car company marketing and green lights from the NHTSA, that our cars -- increasingly electronically complex -- would keep our families safe while we put ever more miles on the odometer.

The automobile, not the computer or smart phone, is still the technological icon we venerate with the greatest fervor. The car is the most important, most expensive piece of technology most of us own. It is the technology of the past century, and neither BP nor Toyota would be as large or as powerful without that reverence.

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Editor’s note: This is an essay from Jason Henderson, a Geography Professor at San Francisco State
University. He was born and raised in New Orleans and spent many years
exploring Louisiana’s wetlands. He is currently writing a book about
the politics of mobility, and frequently advocates for reduced car
parking and improved bicycle space in San Francisco.

The Moratorium

After almost two months of failed attempts at "topkills," "tophats," "junkshots," "cofferdams," and "caps-on-the-diamond-cut-riser" it is evident that the BP wellhead spewing oil into the Gulf of Mexico has unleashed an unprecedented catastrophe. We made a mistake in wishing away the risks of deepwater drilling. Despite protests from the oil industry, the six-month moratorium proposed by the Obama administration is clearly needed in order for the nation to have a pointed and deliberate reflection about its priorities.

As a Louisiana native I am sensitive to the disruption this moratorium might cause for the 150,000 people employed in offshore drilling and corollary services. Yet take one look at the destruction of a truly renewable and sustainable industry — fisheries — and think it through. The offshore oil industry just killed the commercial and recreational fishing industry, it may destroy tourism, and will kill more if we do not get drilling and environmental protection right. How many jobs will be lost because of this ecological catastrophe? And what future start-up companies or footloose firms want to move to a region that is mired in a toxic cesspool of oil? Who would want to invest in property or raise families in a region that has not carefully protected its environment and regulated polluting industries? In the long run, the moratorium gives us time to work this out, and is better for the Gulf Coast economy. It’s also best for the nation.

But in the short run, a solid and comprehensive moratorium could mean roughly 1.7 million barrels a day eliminated from the US energy portfolio without any stopgap measure in place to check that demand. Far-off energy miracles in hydrogen, wind, solar, or nuclear energy will not meet the immediate demand. Instead, as Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu points out, the nation might get the 1.7 million barrels it draws from the Gulf from somewhere else.[1]

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Sometimes it takes an outsider's perspective to see things clearly. So what would an extra-terrestrial think of humankind's dependence on fossil fuels? In light of the devastation being unleashed off the shores of the Gulf states, cartoonist and recent Pulitzer recipient Mark Fiore files this brilliant summation of the absurdly self-destructive lengths we earthlings go to for our "lizard squeezins."

Editor's note: Jason Henderson is a geography professor at San Francisco State University who is writing a book on the politics of mobility in cities. He grew up in New Orleans, where he spent much time in the coastal wetlands of Louisiana while also observing the activity of the oil and gas industry. He has never owned a car.

For almost a century my native Louisiana has been expendable when it comes to America's voracious appetite for oil. Now after over a week of national media attention, the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill is suddenly big enough to bring President Obama down for a disaster tour this past Sunday.  

No one can say when the gushing river of oil will stop. But as we watch and ponder this sorry state of affairs, environmentalists will demand loudly that Obama retract his earlier proposal to loosen offshore drilling policy. Perhaps they are right, but like other Americans, most of those same people will likely keep on driving. So I take this moment to urge environmentalists to reflect upon their relationship between oil and driving. We need oil and are lucky as a civilization to be endowed with oil, but most people are squandering this precious resource by driving.  We need to use oil more wisely.

I see incredible value in oil.  It is one of the most utilitarian natural resources known to humans. Oil stores tremendous amounts of energy, it is very easy to transport long distances by pipeline, rail, ship, and by truck, and it can sit for a long time without degrading. It can be refined and distilled easily and its petroleum by-products are used in plastics and pharmaceuticals, and are part of the food system.

Wind turbines and solar panels are made from polymers that come from oil. The new alternative energy future promoted by environmentalists will be made from oil. Growing plants to drive cars also requires oil. Oil will be needed to build new high speed rail lines, bicycle networks, light rail systems, electric buses, and new ways of organizing work and shopping through compact urban development. In sum, we'll need to keep drilling for oil so that we can shift to a more sustainable energy path that significantly reduces our overall dependence on oil.   

As many environmentalists point out, we do not need to keep drilling everywhere. We do not need to keep searching further offshore, or push into remote, wild areas, or burn toxic tar sands. We need to conserve. We need to reduce per-capita consumption. But most importantly, we need to stop driving everywhere for everything so that oil can be used more intelligently and judiciously.

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America's oil addiction is readily acknowledged, even by its biggest enablers. But what is the nation actually doing to kick the habit and embrace a safer, healthier, more realistic energy future? 

An attempt to answer that question was released Tuesday [PDF] by the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), which has ranked the "oil vulnerability" of the 50 states for three years running.

On its face, the list is unsurprising: Mississippi remains in first place, with the average driver spending more than 9 percent of annual income on gas, while Massachusetts, New York, and Connecticut were rated the least oil-dependent states. Yet NRDC's analysis also offers some instructive tidbits:

• New York is the overwhelming leader in transit -- but not much else. The state dedicated 41 percent of its federal transportation money to transit as opposed to roads in 2007, making it the benchmark by which NRDC measured all others. Yet that was only enough to hit No. 6 on the overall scale of sustainable energy use, thanks to the state's lack of a low-carbon or renewable fuel standard, action on smart growth, and incentives for hybrid vehicles.

• New Jersey's transit spending may not be getting through to some of its drivers. The state ranked second behind New York with 30 percent of transport cash used on transit, but the state's average driver spent $2,286 on gas last year compared with $1,654 in New York. It's not due to a high state gas tax; New Jersey's is one of the lowest in the nation. 

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I hate to nitpick at an outstanding and historic speech but it's January 21 and time to start talking about the stimulus bill, so, well, I'll let James Howard Kunstler do the nitpicking...

“We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars…”
-- Barack Obama's inaugural address.

“The last thing this nation needs now is a stimulus plan aimed at the development of non-gasoline-powered automobiles married with extensive rehabilitation of the highway system.”
-- James Howard Kunstler

With the president-elect, Congress and the current White House divided on how or if American taxpayers should save the domestic auto industry, General Motors is taking its case directly to the public with this video and accompanying web site. More threat than appeal, the message, in a nutshell, is "Do it, or else."

On gmfactsandfiction.com, the reeling giant "Tells It Like It Is":

From plants to parks. From dealerships to driveways. From gas stations to grocery stores. What happens in the automotive industry affects each and every one of us. In fact, the collapse of the U.S.-based auto industry wouldn't just impact the more than 239,000 Americans directly employed by the Big Three. One out of every 10 people in America is employed in a service that is related to the U.S. auto industry. If a plant closes, so does its suppliers, the local stores, the hot dog vendors, and the local restaurants. The effect would be devastating in ways of which you never have thought.

Writing your congressperson yet? Well what are you gonna do now that your "suppliers and dealers" can't get credit? Who's gonna keep you supplied, man?

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