NASA’s unmanned Voyager 1 spacecraft was launched in 1977 and now is really getting out there. Via TPM, prepare to have your eggs scrambled.
What’s the Question?
Oh, yes: Why are BP’s profits down?
Analysts at banks including UBS, Bank of America and JPMorgan Cazenove now predict BP could unlock as much as $100 billion for investors, either by splitting its upstream exploration and production division from its refining and marketing arm, or selling off its entire US business.
BP’s shares are still trading 28% lower than they were at the time of the Macondo spill in April, despite oil prices soaring to $127 a barrel this year. Shell is up 13% over the same period.
A breakup? Is the writing on the wall that difficult to parse? Investors – I resent that term – may indeed only feel the company has only lost its way. But they are fooling themselves in their larger capacity as citizens grappling with how an oil giant deals with the future of transportation. What happens at those board meetings anyway? Do they really sit and listen to climate change deniers spout off? Really? Electric cars as the connection from the past to what’s next continue to dog the energy dinosaurs [sorry]. It’s powering those which is where the money is and will be, until people can figure how to live closer to work. What happened to Beyond Petroleum? Was it only an excellent marketing strategy?
The Modern Transport System
In China.
High-speed trains linking Beijing and Shanghai made their passenger debut Thursday on a $33 billion track China hopes will help ease its overloaded transport system.
…
The fast link, which has been hit by safety concerns and graft, is opening a year ahead of schedule and will be able to carry 80 million passengers a year — double the current capacity on the 1,318-kilometre (820-mile) route.
So we get safety and graft concerns, too, but without the fancy new rail lines to show for it. And sure, destructive for the airline industry, okay, what else? Have you flown recently? The airlines are about as cavalier about comfort, cost and efficiency as is sub-humanly possible. The flight distance between Atlanta and Boston is about 950 miles, and we’re at least twenty years away from China building a high-speed rail route linking the two cities. Probably more.
Biking = $$$
So… I’m contemplating getting rid of my parking sticker to become, for the second time, exclusively a walker/biker to work. There are a few different reasons for this, which shall remain obscured for the moment, but all of them are good. But even thinking about it seriously, where you consider a change in behavior and perhaps various alternative uses for a non-trivial yearly sum, you stumble onto all kinds of causation-related affinities for greater Bikedom. If you live in any place even remotely bicycle-friendly, reasons to give up the car are literally all around. And many of them wind up with reserved seats on the green-means-green continuum. To wit:
More here.
Gasoline Monoculture
Could you get to work if gas became unaffordable? To get groceries? Get the kids to school?
What is obvious is that the kind of monocultural economy that we have, based on gasoline, is unsustainable and vulnerable to price increases not to mention availability.
So many of the “controversies” we have in planning really come down to building a land use and transportation paradigm that is resilient, one that is less dependent on external inputs.
Hello? The extraordinarily limited (~1) diversity of options is not something we can suddenly retro-fit to our society in the face of skyrocketing transportation costs. And so we’ll be left to simply not go to school and work, and spend our days trekking from suburban enclaves to the grocery store and back. Well, what? Why not consider it that way? Do you actually have a perception of how far two miles is? Five? We rigidly ignore any possibility that our way o’ life will ever be interrupted. People have internalized the idea that transportation alternatives are some kind of antagonistic socialism meant for depraved urban scum or hippies or the poor (commutative property could be in order here). Now what?
link via.
Peephole to the Future
An interesting side point:
Consequently, in the short term the demand for oil isn’t very elastic. That means that if you brought oil up to $200 a barrel by raising taxes you’d generate a bunch of revenue that could be offset with lower income taxes or what have you. But if oil goes up to $200 a barrel because of supply constraints, then that entails a rise in America’s net imports and therefore a drag on GDP. In the long run, I’m sure we can adjust to high oil prices the same as we’d adjust to anything else.
Tangential to his larger point there, but in fact you can imagine a future with $200 a barrel oil that people reconcile themselves to and curse the Saudis or Venezuela or whomever our media mavens signal we should divert our rage – and then people would just find a way to deal. But can you see the same price per barrel brought on voluntarily as a pre-emptive step? Not at all. We could never reconcile ourselves that sort of planning, even in the face of a strict inevitability.
So the thing is, peer into the future through this fence and what do you see? Pain and insult or progress? Because finding a way to cope anyway in the face of $8 -$10/gallon gas is an insult to any kind of hopeful future, low-oil or no. It means we are capable, though not amenable, to changes in habits, lifestyle and consumption. We choose to do nothing until we are forced, then we will anyway?
Nothing limits your choices quite like flaunting them.
The Trains in Spain
Move speedily across the plain, much faster than those in Maine. Or even between Boston and Philly.
TPM has a rather pathetic feature about the future present of High Speed Rail around the world and what several countries have been able to accomplish with some wise investment, imagination and planning. Pathetic in the sense that it makes the US look like chumps, real and actual morons for being lead by our loyalty to outmoded technology and means of transportation. But look Ma, we’ve got all these awesome tanks and bunker-busting bombs! Yes, there is shock, and more than a little awwww… but not the good kind.
Look at the pics they’ve put up and then compare them to this:
I took that right before we boarded for a trip to NYC two years ago. It was an all night trip, great experience, priced comparable to flying except for far less hassle both departing and arriving, thus exacting a far lesser human toll. But look at that train. Our National Train System. It was rickety; there was still a space in the wall of the sleeper where a monitor with VCR had been installed, then taken out. But even so, there’s still nothing like seeing the countryside passing by the window next to you. Plus the conversations you get into over twelve hours together. And the Porter was the same vintage as the train car – tons of great stories he didn’t even need to tell you, so clearly were they written into his face and wrinkled hands.
We took the Eurostar with garcon d’verte in 2000 and the TGV many times before and since – the comparison is not the point. Look at the slide show above, it’s like another planet somewhere. They’ve left us far behind and long ago. A guy in the 3rd this summer described to me how they were testing a newer, faster TGV that met some crazy speed for a mere electric train – at nearly 600 km/hour it was outrunning the current that powers it, creating a new array of problems for the engineers, problems that they will solve.
The point is how much of this future present we are deliberately denying ourselves, all for the sake of infinite hegemony for car maker and oil companies. We are powerless before their century-plus of lobbying and propaganda, the individual freedom we believe was immaculately conceived within the sacred chambers of the combustion engine, from which we must not be sundered.
Meanwhile, we munch a Gordita and listen to Beck on the Interstate while a dude in Shanghai is sleeping on the maglev, dreaming of a day or a girl or a boy or a house or a song or a cure or another train, to somewhere. Who’s future is it, again?
What does Green(e) Street mean?
I was just up in the city of New Amsterdam with a couple of ne’er-do-wells of mutual acquaintance. We were staying on a street that featured an interesting configuration of pavement designs.
That’s Grand Street. The arrows denote the bike lanes and the tourist buses that are now impaired from criss-crossing SoHo because of said bike lanes. Also offended: trucks of all kinds. It’s a one-way, with a line of parking separating the bike lanes from traffic – an excellent safety and alt transportation feature that snakes through SoHo, Chinatown and Little Italy and has upset all kinds of other users. Bloomberg wanted 1,800 miles of bike lanes in the city and this is what that kind of conflict thinking looks like. Definitely still a work in progress.
Sharing the road is difficult, but not impossible, especially if the number of combustion-engine vehicles remains the same. Taking some number of C-E vehicles off the road: also very difficult.
How to Make Things
This is how you do it, 101.
The New Train Hold-up
Authentic frontier gibberish leadership:
In his State of the Union address this year, the president called for building high-speed rail, and backed up his words with $8 billion in stimulus money, distributed to various states, for rail projects.
But Republican candidates for governor in some of the states that won the biggest stimulus rail awards are reaching for the emergency brake.
In Wisconsin, which got more than $810 million in federal stimulus money to build a train line between Milwaukee and Madison, Scott Walker, the Milwaukee County executive and Republican candidate for governor, has made his opposition to the project central to his campaign.
Makes you proud to be a North American. Among many, one question is whether some non-trivial number of voters already believe this is the way to go or are these guys – and these are mostly guys – able to convince them. I mean, what’s the appeal of thumbing your nose at hundreds of millions of dollars coming to your state for infrastructure upgrades and expanded capabilities also known as huge quality of life improvements? Sure, running against the black socialist president might poll well, but c’mon man. A huge country full of big cities connected only by interstates and airports. How far does resentment toward fancy European transportation systems actually take you? Maybe the real question is, how long does it take to get there?