“And please don’t blame the activist for sitting on the train track.”
Why not? The way to limit production is to limit consumption. I have had this argument with lots of activists.
Corporations will continue to make whatever they can sell. Use less is the way to prevent making. Attempting to stop production when there is demand is almost fruitless. Why not demonstrate at gas stations? Why not demonstrate at SUV dealers? Why not protest car-oriented urban sprawl? Why not protest car-oriented malls? The amount of the US that is paved for parking is about the size of Rhode Island, 1,200 square miles.
Invading refineries or corporate offices, turning valves (which can lead to an explosion), and blocking railroad tracks is so much more hip. Why not block streets, roads, interstates, and runways? Oh…those only represent using the oil and they’re dangerous.
Brave is not as much as foolish. A train uses 10% of the energy because it has 10% of the friction between the wheel and the rolling surface. That also means it takes a long time to stop. A “brave” activist in California a few decades ago learned that the hard way when he lay on the track in front of a slow moving weapons train that “should have stopped.” Well…it couldn’t and he lost his legs. How about the engineer that couldn’t get it stopped? Is he merely sacrificed for the cause? Read up on what running over people does to engineers. They can expect to kill at least four people over the course of a career. A former colleague stopped counting at 27. He stopped getting off the engine to see about the person(s) who got hit (some on foot, some in vehicles). He got to consuming a lot of Seagram’s VO to deal with life. One guy hit the breaking point at after that last fatal just got off the engine in the middle of nowhere and walked away. No, he didn’t come back to the railroad. How about the firefighters and paramedics who need to try to put Humpty Dumpty back together in some meaningful way? I worked with one who finally couldn’t take the emotional trauma of so frequently being powerless to keep life in the body. Are they sacrificed for the cause too? Oh, maybe causing a derailment is fun. Yes, an emergency rate braking application at low speed can derail a train. Go for it.
“Without good mass transit it is very difficult for the necessary numbers of activists to get themselves to the train tracks at the right time due to the fluidity of many direct actions. ”
Let’s see…the legislature just lowered car license tab fees because of car/truck/SUV owner complaints. That may or may not reduce the extent of ST3. Do we see anybody protesting against lowering the license fees? Oh…that isn’t sexy like scaling fences, cutting chains, and camping on railroad tracks.
How about a train trip of 2 hours 30 minutes every hour between Seattle and Portland, 2 hours 45 minutes Seattle – Vancouver BC bi-hourly. It’s a 20 year program that will be in service in 2018…oh…this is 2018. It wasn’t funded, was it? Oh well. Clamoring for that…nope.
I have mentioned my oil train content list to activists who have bristled at the thought that I might be blaming their habits for oil trains. Some have been hostile. A German colleague told me that it seems that Americans can’t entertain themselves without gasoline.
In Europe, one can get along just fine without a car. In the times that I have visited Europe, I have been in a taxi once (because my Bulgarian colleague and I managed to get lost in Zurich at 3am) and in a car once (the conversation with the professor I was visiting became too engaged; the university was a 30 minute walk from the station and he realized that my train was going to leave in 15 minutes). Other than that, it’s been walking and trains. My friend in Braunschweig Germany doesn’t drive. He doesn’t have a license. He doesn’t need it. How does that happen? How about gasoline at 6-8 bucks a gallon and a tax on vehicle CO2 and other emissions in addition to registration fees? Nope, that won’t fly here. When the price gets to be over $3 per gallon, there is loud demand for the US government to do something about it. Either we invade another little country to defend and stabilize our oil under their dirt, or we tap the strategic reserve to flood the market and lower the price. Is anybody protesting that? Nope.
A couple of decades ago, there was a suggestion that a one cent per gallon addition to the federal gasoline tax, dedicated to Amtrak, could bring Amtrak into about the 50s…maybe the 60s level of service. That was a non-starter. Were there protests? No. There was relief at not having to pay another penny per gallon.
Long ago, there was a state five cent additional tax per gallon of gasoline, dedicated to transportation. If I remember correctly, highways got $14 billion. Rail projects got $250 million The highway folks insisted that it was their money that had been stolen and repeatedly tried to find ways to get it. Anybody protest that? Nope.
The US military is the entity that has the largest oil consumption in the world. Is anyone protesting that? We’re lucky to have anyone merely protesting war, let alone the military’s oil consumption. That’s unpatriotic. The brave soldiers are defending our freedom. By maintaining and enlarging an empire? No they are contributing to the collapse.
Export coal going to China (which generates protest) makes the electricity for the cheap plastic stuff that comes back to fill the shelves of Walmart and such (which does not). The manufacturing jobs precede or follow the coal. People flock to Walmart (where employees get public assistance to survive) to get the best price, then can’t figure out why there is so much unemployment and homelessness. Of course, they won’t pay extra to buy something that is well made here (if you can even find it any more…but I’ll settle for well made in Germany, Spain, etc.). Then the cheap plastic junk that is the product of oil and coal gets ditched because it is junk. Then folks buy more to replace it. There doesn’t seem to be protest over that cycle…except a cursory protest over Walmart coming to town…sometimes.
Need a couple of #10×2″ screws to finish up a repair or project? Go on down to the store to get…ten of them in a plastic bag. The little baggie is useless for anything else, so it is ditched – hopefully in one of the plastic bag recycle boxes. Does anybody protest that? Nope. You can be sure, though, that no terrorist put germs into your bag of eight too many screws. I was working a gig on the road and found that I forgot my utility knife. I needed one and had to go to a hardware store to get it. There was a choice of several.They all had packaging. Some had PACKAGING. I bought the one that had the least packaging and I still needed a knife to open the package so that I could use the knife! Does anybody protest that wasteful use of oil? (Short answer: Nope.)
Folks feel so smugly good (except the ones who resent having to do it) about recycling. Let’s see…buy throwaway packaging. Throw it in a bin. The diesel (or CNG, we protest both) truck picks it up and pours it all into a big pile in the truck. The truck drives to a facility to be dumped into a bigger pile. The pile is sorted into material types with the aid of a diesel front end loader. The front end loader than loads the various piles into diesel trucks to be hauled to a facility of some sort to re manufacture the stuff in some way. Oh, the bulk of it goes to China (one of the largest exports of the US is garbage) in a diesel ship. Ah, but we recycle. We’re being so ecologically friendly. Is anyone protesting that cycle of oil use…uh, no.
Nope, as a society, and even as environmental activists, we want oil production to stop and don’t want to protest the egregious useless consumption that causes the production.
There was a protest blocking the railroad in Olympia to protest the shipment of fracking sand…but there was no shipment of fracking sand. Other things were blocked, but that’s just the cost of protesting. I’ve got it! If trains are so evil, let’s use trucks. One railroad car holds about four semi trailers and it takes a tenth of the energy to move it…but we need to block shipments because some trains might have oil production related shipments. Decades ago, the folks in Bellingham were so happy when the daily train of rock to the cement factory went away. The railroad was bankrupt and couldn’t stay in business (the days when the federal government was actually competing against the railroad industry at the same time as applying destructive economic regulation. Yay government, go get those evil profiteering robber baron railroads-except that part was 100 years previous). Hooray for our side! Oh…then the cement factory needed 180 trucks of stone a day to keep up production and stay in business. They protested and protested and protested. Those trucks shouldn’t be using our streets! They won. The cement factory closed. Oh…all the jobs in the neighborhood went away. How did that happen?
It’s easy to blame all of this on capitalism. Personal responsibility is not a really big thing in the US. No matter what happens, it is obviously someone else’s fault.
I’m all for those brave protesters actually being brave and protesting against what needs to be protested against and protesting for what needs to be supported.
-30-
Thos
So absolutely spot on.