John Edwards embraces enviro politics, a little too warmly

…Transform the Auto Industry to Lead the World in Cars of the Future: Edwards believes that everyone should be able to drive the car, truck or SUV of their choice and still enjoy high fuel economy. American automakers have the ingenuity to lead the world in building the clean, safe, economical cars of the future.

No, no, no. Sure everyone loves to drive, and it would be political suicide to say what really needs to be done — bring an end to the automobile’s dominance of transportation. But at least Edwards could avoid singing the praises of the SUV, if not the car itself. Why can’t someone call for a resurrection of passenger rail in this country. James Kunstler suggests that restoring America’s once glorious rail era (“we used to have a passenger rail network that was the envy of the world, now it would shame Bulgaria”) would go a long way toward boosting the nation’s confidence in our ability to reshape the country along environmental lines. And he’s right. “A Better Amtrak” isn’t exactly a winner of a campaign slogan, but I’m sure Edwards’ people could come up with something.


Produce 65 Billion Gallons of Ethanol a Year by 2025

That would be catastrophic. Now it’s becoming clear that Edwards is simply embracing every popular idea in the environmental catalog without thinking them through. Ethanol is not the answer. It’s not even a serious part of the solution. Sure, in a few small areas, a few people could run a few vehicles on ethanol. But for every acre of corn devoted to ethanol, another acre is lost for food and feed. George Monbiot summarizes the problem well. Already we’ve seen Mexicans hit with high cornflour prices, and now egg producers are expecting to have to raise their prices because of the cost of corn feed is rising, all thanks to increased demand from ethanol plants. Biodiesel is similarly restricted to small-scale local operations for those and other reasons, including disastrous land-management problems in southeast Asia.

The Island of Doubt