What is so maddening is why prescriptions like those of Spitzer and others for a genuinely serious investment in high speed rail have not generated more public support, more support from elected officials, university presidents, editorial writers and bloggers. High speed rail is a necessary if insufficient part of the solution. We need more "opinion makers" to make noise about it.

High speed rail is good-but it has nothing to do with creating long-term jobs in manufacturing. We would just be buying more foreign debt for the foreign built trains. To get manufacturing back to the US,we have to stop the lawyers' lawsuits and gov't unfunded mandates that made it hard to manufacture things in the US.

Why can't we build (at least some of) the trains here? That's a premise of what Spitzer is saying: we need to convert some of our moribund auto production to train production.

If companies like GM could see themselves as transportation companies instead of users of fossil fuels, workers could be building railroad cars and engines, biodiesel truck and buses, and something to replace our polluting and dangerous autos. High speed rail is a great way to move people between cities. The rails could go right down the middle of our interstate highways.

right on!

The USA was a major manufacturer of everything till a few decades ago when the culture of lawyers and gov't made it very unfriendly to try to build things in America. Yes, there is no question Americans can build things- and yes there is no question that if someone wants to build a factory they build it OUTSIDE the USA to avoid the anti-manufacturing attitude of the USA. Few want a factory next door and gov't sees factories as places to put unfunded social mandates- the factory builder avoids all that by building it elsewhere.

siempre:

The USA was a major manufacturer of everything till a few decades ago when the culture of lawyers and gov't made it very unfriendly to try to build things in America. Yes, there is no question Americans can build things- and yes there is no question that if someone wants to build a factory they build it OUTSIDE the USA to avoid the anti-manufacturing attitude of the USA. Few want a factory next door and gov't sees factories as places to put unfunded social mandates- the factory builder avoids all that by building it elsewhere.

Yeah, let's get back to those days of heinously overpolluting firms belching poisons indiscriminately into the air, the water, the earth and their massively underpaid and abused workers.

The following is from <link>

If we believe that we have high tech solutions just over our horizon, we may be in for a severe bought of depression. Local economies will likely rise as global economies slip into decline, creating no small measure of hardship for many. Wake up folks. The end is not coming, but big changes are.

"Electricity isn’t an energy source; it has to be generated, using some other energy source to do so. The electricity that powers the European and Japanese rail systems is mostly generated by plants that burn coal, with significant help from nuclear reactors and a rather smaller assist from hydroelectric plants. Of these, only the hydroelectric plants are a renewable energy source; the others are poised just as firmly on the downslope of depletion as the diesel oil that runs American locomotives. Coal is turning out to be much less abundant than the cozy estimates of a few decades ago made it sound, and of course there’s the far from minor impact of coal burning on an already unstable global climate. Fissionable uranium is well down its own depletion curve, and it’s worth noting that the enthusiastic claims sometimes made for breeder reactors, the use of thorium as a nuclear fuel, and other alternatives to conventional fission plants are very rarely to be heard from people who have professional training in the fields concerned. Thus my reader was quite simply wrong; the European and Japanese rail systems that so excited his admiration are just as dependent on nonrenewable fuels as the American system, and are also just as vulnerable to the economic implications of supply and demand as energy supplies dwindle. Now of course there are other reasons why railroads may be kept in service, at least for certain uses, long after they become economic liabilities. Many of the world’s larger nations – the United States and Russia among them – grew to their present size only after rail transport made it possible to exert political and economic power on a continental scale, and future governments may well keep long-distance rail links going as a matter of national survival. That likelihood, though, does nothing to counter the point central to last week’s post: that in a world with much less energy, older and more energy-efficient transport methods such as canal boats may turn out to be much more economically viable than their more recent and more extravagant replacements, and those cities and regions well positioned to take advantage of waterborne transport may therefore thrive in the 21st century as they did in the 19th."

Why would anyone allow a tool like Elliot Spitzer to write an article for them? This guy is a disgrace to the state of New York, his family and his friends. He is better off leaving the United States and moving to a remote island by himself. What a loser.

There is no free ride-either in energy or jobs. The economy and energy production are real-you can't have an economy, manufacturing ,jobs ,energy etc with no changes to the environment-the key is to minimize them.