Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Railroads railroaded

Krugman is "surprised that the econoblogosphere hasn’t taken much notice yet of Keith Bradsher’s interesting piece on the revival of the Silk Road — now not consisting of camels carrying Chinese silk, but of huge freight trains carrying Chinese electronics.

But really, if you’re interested in globalization, this should be of great interest. Transportation technology matters, a lot; container shipping revolutionized the world."

Then the good Paul falls partly back into his old mistake:"It comes down, of course, to time and money... Shipping is cheap but slow."

Excuse me?

Shipping is cheap because it uses bunk oil, the most polluting refuse oil.


Introducing a carbon & pollution tax on shipping would force shipping to retool, say with (partial) sails (or kites). The tech exists, and was long deployed on the Club Med II, a very large ship that saves considerable fuel thanks to the help it gets from sails.

Railroads are enormously efficient, even the obsolete diesel electric engines used in the USA. Their contribution to CO2 is neglectable, relative to the alternatives. Thus all ecologists ought to come aboard.

Krugman opines that: "So there’s an important niche for rail — a niche that probably hasn’t been fully exploited, because people forgot for a while about a technology that seemed old-fashioned."

The truth, according to Krugman, would be that "people" just had amnesia?
Old fashioned, with TGVs going at 400 kilometers per hour?

The truth is different. Quite the opposite; plutocrats remembered very well they could pollute as much as they wanted with shipping and air travel, and get subsidies, to boot.

Air fuel is not taxed, worldwide. In Greece ship magnates don't pay tax either (and one of them had a child with Obama's ex-director of budget, now a pillar of Citigroup). Much of Western policy, in particular in the USA has been made to please fossil fuel plutocrats.

The problem with rail? It's too efficient, hence does not feed enough the clout of the fossil fuel lobby and the politicians associated to it.

http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

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