This has been an interesting and at times amusing thread.
The answer is YES. We should have been doing this all along, but the oil industry has had a lot of power over government and business.
Railroads have historically lost out to highway and airline interests in terms of government regulation et al. This is because railroads became associated with the "robber barons" of the 19th century, so it was a moral imperative to stop railroad companies. Today, it's all about how much money can be made right now and shared between a lobbyist and a politician's campaign, not about what is best for the nation. As they sang in the Disney movie Pete's Dragon: "
money, money, money by the pound".
This is
what killed the trolleys, which were electric railroads for the most part. I've met Jim Klein (the filmmaker) before. It's sad that GM was so proud of what they did and actually bragged about the judgement against them and the slap-on-the-wrist $1000 fine issued in 1977. Big business can be just as much of a problem as the government - where it makes a difference is in the people involved and their character. Private sector/capitalism isn't always the utopia that it's made out to be. This will need to be solved before railroads can get anywhere with this. IF the current administration fulfills its promise on energy policy, this will be the biggest help the railroads have ever gotten on energy/electrification. Hiring a Nobel Prize winning physicist instead of the standard politician-buddy to head the DOE can only help.
I did a research paper in high school on energy, focusing on nuclear energy but including other sources for comparison. Nuclear's big problem was waste, followed by image and health concerns. People are afraid of nuclear, thus all the NIMBYs everytime someone talks about building a nuclear plant anywhere in the USA. I am not aware of any source saying it takes 35 years to build a nuclear plant. Five, maybe ten with all the research studies to be done, but not 35. You don't just buy land and plop one down. San Andreas would be a classic case of a bad place to build one. Nuclear is hard to deal with and finnicky. There are better, easy, cheaper solutions out there.
In 1990, it cost the U.S. taxpayers between $7 and $9 per gallon of gasoline to bring it in an oil tanker from the Middle East to the American coast. That includes the cost of using destroyers as escorts to prevent them from being bombed. Remember? At that time, a gallon of gasoline in Germany was something like $16 to $25 with the 1990 exchange rate in place. Even if new domestic sources are considered (ANWR), the needed infrastructure to reach those new sources will take 10 years to build and get running.
pommie wrote:
"Wind power, only good when the wind is blowing,
Solar power, only good when the sun is shining,
Hydro power, admittedly a great source of power still relies on rain fall,
Tidal power, only good while the tide is flowing, stops four time a day,"
Not exactly true. Wind turbines are built in windy areas, but if you can go about 200 feet or so up, it tends to be more consistently windy. Everytime I see them, they're moving.
We are ALWAYS receiving solar energy, even on cloudy days. This is how it is possible to get a sunburn on a cloudy day - I know because I've done it. If this weren't true, temperatures on cloudy days would plummet to around 30 below zero Fahrenheit. Fortunately, global warming (the kind we had before industrialization) helps prevent this from happening at night. Today's solar panels are way better than they were 20 years ago and way better than the ones in your calculator. This isn't as much of a problem as the tinfoil hat-wearers on AM radio make it sound. Their commercial sponsors pay them lot$ of money to make people afraid and mad.
The problem with hydro is that you need a large, fast-flowing river. If you don't have one, you can't use hydro. We know where all the rivers are, so we aren't going to discover any new ones. Lots of good sturgeon fishing is gone from the Pacific Northwest now that we've dammed so many rivers to produce electricity. The rivers then start to fill with sediment.
Tidal power is
FREE. We've never used it. The moon powers it. It doesn't stop, although the rate of tidal movement does reach zero
BRIEFLY (kind of like a ball's velocity reaches zero briefly after you throw it in the air), but since neither the moon nor the Earth stop moving, it's not a problem. The solution here is to built tidal power plants along the coastlines - where most big cities are.
Any of these would make good sources of electricity for an electric railroad. I'd lean towards solar and tidal. I think we'd get more bang for the buck.
SuperFudd - I would recommend reading something that isn't written by someone making money from it. Scientific research would be a good start.
backyard - Pittsburgh, October of 1948. Have any idea what happened? Or has the media conveniently forgotten? In the suburb of Donora, the pollution of all the nearby steel mills and other businesses that were building things "to do things like move around & even carry stuff" sat in the valley, producing a noxious smog that asphyxiated 20 and hospitalized over 7,000 people. From then on, local governments employed spotters to watch railroad yards and trains for steam locomotives that produced too much smoke or lacked smoke consumers. This was not an accident, this was something that had been building but no one did anything about it until it was too late - as usual. This was not natural or from a volcano, it was clearly manmade.
It used to be that many comedians, I remember Jack Benny in particular, made jokes about
the brown haze that hung over Los Angeles. This was not by accident or Act of God. This was caused by nitrous emissions from known sources: automobiles, buses, and industries. It didn't just start floating out of the ground. If there really was no problem, then no one would have started documenting and writing about it, and we wouldn't know about any of this.
We have more people with asthma than ever before in history.
Homo sapiens wouldn't have lasted past the saber-toothed cats if this had been "normal". What has changed? The air. Watch any truck, bus, or locomotive and you'll see emissions. It doesn't cease to exist or magically turn into flowers. The Law of Conservation of Matter still exists. Those molecules
go somewhere and
do something.
What is holding us back from electric railroads in the U.S. (and other nifty things) besides politics and business that fears change is the misinformation out there spread against it by those who want it to stay the same and a lack of leadership in favor of it. Should we electrify railroads in the USA? Indeed, how can we afford not to? At some point, it will likely
have to happen for economic and ecological reasons. It would have been cheaper to have done this decades ago. Look at the money we could have saved if only those working against it hadn't.
Forward we go anyway.
...this is the status quo...
