And sadly, this is why the United States is dying. It refuses to look at its past/current/future behavior and pass self judgement. The nationalistic and consumerism marketing of “greatness” is so effective all it takes is the political version of a meth dealer to say, “no you look great, teeth rot is all the rage” as they strip every asset from the pathetic American junkies looking for just one more fix while thinking “obviously it’s the others that put me here, not my addiction or dealer.”
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On what basis are we getting pretty screwed by climate change right now? Things in America seem pretty good right now to me.
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“If I were to ignore how slow high speed rail actually is and fictionally make it twice as fast then it would work better in my fantasy world.”
Ok.
To be clear, I wasn’t talking about fictional high speed rail. I was talking about actual high speed rail.
The brand new Tibetan bullet train has a top operational speed of 75 mph (though it is capable of going up to 100 mph) and it takes 22 hours to make the 1,215 mile from Xining to Lhasa… with only a single stop. That’s an average speed of 55 mph.
Japan’s bullet train from Tokyo to Fukuoka takes 5 hours to go 674 miles for an average speed of 138 mph… and it traverses no mountains.
Even applying the 138 mph speed to the 1800 mile trek from NYC to Austin we have a time of over 13 hours. And that’s pretending that the Appalachian mountains don’t exist… which they do.
You could go around the mountains via Jacksonville, I guess, and add another 1.5 hours to the trip.
pun intended?
difference with the republicans are many either fell in with the extremists, or walked away
The Progressives got crushed in the last primary, they’re a very loud minority of the Democratic party. Hopefully they can keep their slogans out of future elections…
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China is a far bigger issue than developing nations. And the big global warming issue is coal.
The US has done a great job shutting down coal plants which has a really big carbon impact. Part of the trouble with the GND is how naive it is on energy policy. Nuclear for a base load and natural gas for the variance should be the solution but for the red tape. The notion we’re going to 100% renewables (or even 50%) our way out of climate change is crazy. The comparison between France and Germany really helps illustrate.
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A statement like that belongs an a humor or at least a red font thread.
I think the Japan example is getting closer.
The US is a large country with a lot of relatively flat ground in the middle. Something like Chicago to pick your favorite city in Texas could operate at a high speed for most of the route, and pick up a few cities along the way.
The project certainly needs to be realistic, but measuring everything based on what exists today is not any more useful than proposing the unrealistic. That’s not how we got to the moon, or built an interstate highway system, or created other things that someone could have similar criticized and deemed as impossible.
Yeah, I basically walked away. I mean, I’d vote for a Republican with character, such as Liz Cheney or Mitt Romney. But they are too few & far between unfortunately and the crazies have taken over the party.
If you’d have told me even as late as 2014 that I’d vote for Joe Biden & Kamala Harris in 6 years I’d have said you were bat shit crazy, yet here we are.
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She made a comment that farting cows are part of the reason for climate change. We have a lot of cows in America…
Don’t take away my cheese!!!
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Is it dying? This seems to be a common refrain, but I don’t see it. It may not be going the way everyone wants it to, but that’s fine. I would rather live here and suffer the problems of capitalism than live in China and suffer the troubles of a planned economy.
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Not sure if you are challenging the comment, as it is true (with the exception that it is burping not farting that is the bigger issue)
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I don’t really know anyone that dislikes AOC. Or likes her for that matter.
I agree to some extent, but… if they can’t make LA to SanFran workable, I don’t think that bodes well for Chicago to Dallas or Houston, and certainly not Seattle to Miami.
High speed rail is a good alternative to air transport for medium distances such as DC-NYC-Boston or LA to SanFran. It’s going to take a lot of technological advances before it can hope to compete with airplanes for coast-to-coast travel.
Surely we should start with the more workable stuff like DC-Boston and LA to SanFran.
BTW, the top operational speed of Acela is 79 mph. The train itself is capable of going much faster, but the track is not. There have been various proposals to upgrade the track, but those all seem to fall flat on their face. And that’s for a route that’s already popular.
I appreciate AOC’s energy and snark.
As a small-ell libertarian, I find many of her headline-generating positions disturbing.
But at least she’s not as disturbing as some members of the MAGA cult sitting on the other side of the aisle.
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I am not familiar with the challenges with the CA project, but it seems more to do with construction and funding costing like 10x what they thought it would than a product that would in the end not be popular.
There is a lot of nothing in the midwest that would get in the way of a rail line between cities, and the land is going to be cheap relative to CA.
I think it is mostly a question of where is the best place to start. LA to SF was started I assume because it was supported by all the liberals that live there, that doesn’t mean it is the best place to roll out a new concept in the US.
I would generally agree though that the value seems to be linking cities of medium distance rather than cross country, especially if you are thinking about business travel. How does that change if we think beyond that? I am not sure.
I think you misunderstood this comment.
I read that to mean: “build out high-speed rail in order to replace a significant % of flights.” Her point is merely that they are substitute services. But she doesn’t talk like a pedantic actuary, she talks like a politician, so she makes it sound rosier.
Did she ever clarify herself?
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In July of 2016, nineteen U.S. Senators delivered a series of speeches denouncing climate change denial from 32 organizations with links to fossil-fuel interests, including the Heritage Foundation.[4] Sen. Whitehouse (RI-D), who led the effort to expose “the web of denial” said in his remarks on the floor that the purpose was to,
"shine a little light on the web of climate denial and spotlight the bad actors in the web, who are polluting our American discourse with phony climate denial. This web of denial, formed over decades, has been built and provisioned by the deep-pocketed Koch brothers, by ExxonMobil, by Peabody coal, and by other fossil fuel interests. It is a grim shadow over our democracy in that it includes an electioneering effort that spends hundreds of millions of dollars in a single election cycle and threatens any Republican who steps up to address the global threat of climate change. . . . [I]t is long past time we shed some light on the perpetrators of this web of denial and expose their filthy grip on our political process. It is a disgrace, and our grandchildren will look back at this as a dirty time in America’s political history because of their work.”[4]
I’m shocked the Heritage Foundation would oppose it.
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I basically agree with this. She’s great, in a way similar to Bernie (or for that matter Ron Paul). She is smart and principled. And that alone makes her better than the rest of our government, but she can’t win if she’s so far left.
I would probably go a bit further, and say that US Democracy is broken generally right now. Congress is powerless, and Democrats are especially powerless, no matter what. The basic mechanisms by which we make laws are broken, and our laws will not represent our will.
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