Montgomery County, MD Green Party Blog

This comes courtesy of Scott “News Junkie Scott” Loughrey (http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/News_Junkie_GP/)

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070315/bs_afp/francetransportrailtgvluxembourggermany_070315062058

Trying to Untie Property Owners’ Hands, Voters Also Ended Some Checks on Sprawl

A voter initiative in 2004, however, undermined the state’s land-use law. With the overwhelming approval of Measure 37, which has been upheld in the courts and is shredding the anti-sprawl status quo, Oregonians unwittingly replaced land-use quirkiness with land-use chaos.

Many here are now suffering from voter’s remorse and want the law fixed, according to opinion polls, newspaper pundits and a number of powerful state politicians.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/10/AR2007031001184.html?nav=hcmodule

The ICC Plans Are Overrunning Derwood

Most of us in Derwood have done our homework on the planned intercounty connector because our town is slated to be the ICC entry point. This summer we’ve watched Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. and Montgomery County Executive Douglas M. Duncan ram through the approvals before the November elections. We’ve seen surveyors’ plastic ribbons fluttering in our woods. We’ve blanched as the state pushes forward on eminent-domain seizure of homes in nearby Cashell Estates.

But no one told us that a midnight confiscation of our private property was in the plan.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/21/AR2006072101413.html

Forbes.com

A group of scientists urged Congress on Wednesday to fund research for plug-in hybrid vehicles, touting the technology as another way to reduce the nation’s dependence on oil through the help of a simple electrical socket.

Click here for link.

Despite the outcry over gas prices, consumers are buying more than ever, and the economy is running smoothly

…[A]nyone can save gasoline simply by slowing down. The federal government says that every five miles per hour you drive above 60 miles per hour is like paying an extra 20 cents a gallon for gasoline.

Yet people aren’t slowing down, at least in any broad sense. Take Maryland, where highway signs alert drivers that lower speeds save fuel. At the request of BusinessWeek, the Maryland Transportation Dept. put together data for six characteristic stretches of highway in the state, comparing average speeds this spring and one year ago. The combined change for the six was a decline of 0.27 miles per hour — statistically insignificant.

To put it bluntly, behaviors haven’t changed because for most Americans, gasoline prices just aren’t high enough to make a difference. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, gasoline accounts for about 4% of a typical consumer’s spending. A healthy chunk, to be sure, but less than the nearly 6% spent on, for example, recreation.

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/may2006/tc20060512_840093.htm?campaign_id=rss_daily

Here’s yet another to quit the fast food habit…

A new study of how much greenhouse gas is released into the atmosphere by the production of food shows that the difference between a meat-based and plant-based diet amounts to the same as driving an SUV versus a small sedan.

The calculations are based on data and a basic ecological concept that have been around for decades, but no one had actually done the math.

“It’s just never been done,” said climate researcher Gidon Eshel of the University of Chicago. “The data is simply there to mine.”

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20060424/veggies_pla.html?source=rss

Bush II is positively delusional if he thinks that corn or hydrogen is going to provide the energy necessary. Now sugar cane is a different matter, but his dear friends on the sugar plantations would not like that one bit — importing sugar would hurt their precious profits…

There is broad bipartisan agreement that the government needs to do more to fund research into vehicles powered by fuels including hydrogen and ethanol.

Click here for link.

Express Toll Lanes Promoted in Study
The fact that mass transit is not being mentioned at all just goes to demonstrate — yet again — just how thoroughly the developer lobby dominates the transportation issue…

Highway congestion has grown so severe that virtually all of the Washington region’s main commuter routes are chronically clogged and unable to move motorists efficiently, according to a regional study released yesterday.

Drivers on some highways designed for mile-a-minute travel are lucky to make five miles in an hour. Freeways that were manageable three years ago, such as the Dulles Toll Road, are now bumper-to-bumper at peak times. Congestion on some highways has doubled in three years, when the last study was released.

Click here for link.

This is the third one of Friedman’s editorials on energy. He takes the Bush administration to task for their failure on energy issues.

You can read the first one here, and the second one here.

No More Mr. Tough Guy
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: February 8, 2006

I’ve always thought Dick Cheney took national security seriously. I don’t anymore. It seems that Mr. Cheney is so convinced that we have no choice but to be dependent on crude oil, so convinced that conservation is just some silly liberal hobby, that he will never seriously summon the country to kick its oil habit, never summon it to do anything great.

Indeed, he seems determined to be a drag on any serious effort to make America energy-independent. He presents all this as a tough-guy “realist” view of the world. But it’s actually an ignorant and naïve view — one that underestimates what Americans can do, and totally misses how the energy question has overtaken Iraq as the most important issue in U.S. foreign policy. If he persists, Mr. Cheney is going to ensure that the Bush team squanders its last three years — and a lot more years for the country.

Listen to Mr. Cheney’s answer when the conservative talk show host Laura Ingraham asked him how he reacted to my urgings for a gasoline tax to push all Americans to drive energy-saving vehicles and make us energy-independent — now.

“Well, I don’t agree with that,” Mr. Cheney said. “I think — the president and I believe very deeply that, obviously, the government has got a role to play here in terms of supporting research into new technologies and encouraging the development of new methods of generating energy. … But we also are big believers in the market, and that we need to be careful about having government come in, for example, and tell people how to live their lives. … This notion that we have to ‘impose pain,’ some kind of government mandate, I think we would resist. The marketplace does work out there.”

What is he talking about? The global oil market is anything but free. It’s controlled by the world’s largest cartel — OPEC — which sets output, and thereby prices, according to the needs of some of the worst regimes in the world. By doing nothing, we are letting their needs determine the price and their treasuries reap all the profits.

Also, why does Mr. Cheney have no problem influencing the market by lowering taxes to get consumers to spend, but he rejects raising gasoline taxes to get consumers to save energy — a fundamental national interest.

Don’t take it from me. Gregory Mankiw of Harvard, who recently retired as chairman of President Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, wrote in The Wall Street Journal on Jan. 3 about his New Year’s resolutions: “Everyone hates taxes, but the government needs to fund its operations, and some taxes can actually do some good in the process. I will tell the American people that a higher tax on gasoline is better at encouraging conservation than are heavy-handed [mileage standards]. It would not only encourage people to buy more fuel-efficient cars, but it would encourage them to drive less.”

Mr. Cheney, we are told, is a “tough guy.” Really? Well, how tough is this: We have a small gasoline tax, but Europe and Japan tax their gasoline by $2 and $3 a gallon, or more. They use those taxes to build schools, highways and national health care for their citizens. But they spend very little on defense compared with us.

So who protects their oil supplies from the Middle East? U.S. taxpayers. We spend nearly $600 billion a year on defense, a large chunk in the Persian Gulf. But how do we pay for that without a gas tax? Income taxes and Social Security. Yes, we tax our incomes and raid our children’s Social Security fund so Europeans and Japanese can comfortably import their oil from the gulf, impose big gas taxes on it at their pumps and then use that income for their own domestic needs. And because they have high gas taxes, they also beat Detroit at making more fuel-efficient cars. Now how tough is that?

Finally, if Mr. Cheney believes so much in markets, why did the 2005 energy act contain about $2 billion in tax breaks for oil companies? Why does his administration permit a 54-cents-a-gallon tax on imported ethanol — fuel made from sugar or corn — so Brazilian sugar exports won’t compete with American sugar? Yes, we tax imported ethanol from Brazil, but we don’t tax imported oil from Saudi Arabia, Venezuela or Russia.

“Everyone says we need a new Marshall Plan,” said Michael Mandelbaum, a foreign policy expert and the author of “The Case for Goliath.” “We have a Marshall Plan. It’s our energy policy. It’s a Marshall plan for terrorists and dictators.”

How tough is it, Mr. Cheney, to will the ends — an end to America’s oil addiction — but not will the means: a gasoline tax? It’s not very tough, it’s not very smart, and it’s going to end badly for us.