We here at Radials promised that the next section of the High Speed Rail would be an international policy comparison. Based on commentary, both digital and personal, it seems that there are two more pressing topics at hand: environment and economics. We’ll start with the environment in this section and move onto the positive and negative fiscal impacts of building HSR in the near future (if you missed Part I of the series you can find it here).
In 2008, Proposition 1a was approved in California with 52% of the vote. It approved a general bond issuance of $9.95 billion dollars to fund a $40 billion dollar project that connected the southern and northern epicenters of California’s populations: Los Angeles and San Francisco. California’s proposition system is a unique process in the United States derived from Platonic ideals about true democracy: people should generate state laws. Propositions are offered by state legislators, the propositions are supported or denounced by given groups, and the voters decide on which statutes are passed or not.
The system is tyrannically fair and has had its fair shares of foul-ups on the part of legislators and the public at-large. In 1978, Californians passed Proposition 13 which severely reduced high property tax rates, capped at 2% of total property value, an idea that was genuinely popular across the political spectrum. Prop 13 also required that a two thirds majority of the state legislature is needed to pass any tax increases, a prerequisite that has made California nearly immune to any tax-hikes. It also severely handicapped local school systems as property taxes were the main source of operating expenses, but Proposition is still overwhelming popular among Californian’s who are burdened with taxes similar to New York or Massachusetts.
A primer on California legislative quirks isn’t necessary to understand HSR and its future in America. The politicization of abstract ideas concurrent with official political campaigns in California does present a capsule of how HSR is treated by either side of the aisle in a severely polarized state and with a minor leap of faith, the nation at large.
This is especially present when the subject of environmentalism is broached. Train travel is generally seen as a more earth-friendly mode of travel for overland trips when compared to cars and airplanes. In a general sense this talking point isn’t in severe err, but the breadth of this type commentary is always open to interpretation. How much better is it? Doesn’t the nature of train travel require more auxiliary travel because the stations are infrequent and immovable? How are we going to power them?
Often these sorts of questions aren’t broached by politicians or HSR advocates and detractors. HSR is painted one way or another depending on which group you’re talking to: an environmentally friendly and consumer amicable alternative to aviation or a half-baked infrastructure plan that will plunge the US into further debt trouble. The truth, as it often does, lay in the middle.
Environmentalists are not usually seen as adept followers of realpolitik and tend to favor the Enlightenment ideals of information over emotion. They are often talented grassroots activists, small scale organizers and fundraisers, and puritanical in their ideals, but they can also be intellectually bereft of savvy and malleability, using talking points as rafters rather than foundations. In California’s case however, they took politicking seriously and no where is that clearer than in the advertising campaign launched by Californian’s for High Speed Rail.
The twin images of HSR and wind energy, two paragons of environmentalism, are not overtly linked in terms of application but more as a theoretical, and more cynically subliminal, link. Clearly, HSR is not going to be powered by wind turbines any more than dense urban areas will in the near future. The conflation of those two ideas is an attempt at a theorized political causation: if HSR is powered by wind turbines, then they must be related.
Copyright of Californians for High Speed Rail
Rail will still be powered by electricity, and in California as well as most other places in the United States, that means coal. I won’t go into the arguments surrounding coal and its place in domestic energy policy —Barbara Freese’s excellent book Coal: A Human History goes into far more detail than I ever could— but there are two things everyone should know about the much maligned carbon-compound: it’s dirty and we have a lot of it.
Does the fact that coal will most likely be powering HSR for years to come argue down the environmentalist view? No, but it does dent it. Coal certainly has a future in the States not least because of its abundance and all factors related to it: coal mining communities, coal refining magnates, and powerful lobbying teams. The fact that coal is a readily available, while not efficient, source of electricity should not completely paralyze the HSR movement.
What does, perhaps, damage the environmental argument of HSR badly is the relative efficiency of HSR when compared to aviation especially.
