Straight Talk (Really) on Energy and Gas

So the Senate offered kind of a retread package of bills on energy and gas prices. They're all fine - cut oil company tax breaks and invest in renewables, investigate price gouging and speculation, a windfall profits tax for Big Oil - but nobody's expecting George Bush to sign this or for many Republicans to sign on. Mary Landrieu didn't support cutting the tax breaks the last time around, so the problem is not with the policy but the politics. Still, it's depressing that these ideas aren't a little bit more innovative. For example, something building on Tom Carper's discussion of transit and land use would have been a nice addition to this package of bills.

I ride the train back and forth most days. I live in Delaware, and I go back and forth. As my colleague, the Presiding Officer, knows, I go back and forth almost every night to Delaware. A strange thing is going on with respect to passenger rail ridership in this country.

I used to serve on the Amtrak board when I was Governor of Delaware, and every year we would see ridership go up by a couple of percentage points. We would struggle, try to raise money out of the fare box to pay for the system and the expansion of the system. Well, the first quarter of this fiscal year, ridership at Amtrak is up 15 percent. Revenues are up by 15 percent. People are starting to realize that maybe it makes sense to get out of our cars, trucks, and vans and take the train or take transit. Transit ridership is up again this fiscal year more dramatically than it has been in some time [...]

Americans are beginning to literally buy homes in places that are closer to opportunities for transit -- for rail, for bus, for subways, for the metro systems. As we have seen the drop in home prices across the country -- in some cases, very dramatic -- among the surprises, at least for me, is to see housing prices stable and in some cases actually going up in places where people can buy a home and live and get to work or wherever they need to go to shop without driving to get there [...]

Before I close, there are a lot of good ideas for things we ought to do. I mentioned, tongue in cheek, that we ought to provide more R&D investment for a new generation of lithium batteries for plug-in hybrid vehicles. I say, tongue in cheek, we ought to use the Government purchasing power to commercialize advanced technology vehicles. We are doing that. I said with tongue in cheek we ought to provide tax credits to encourage people to buy highly efficient hybrid vehicles and very low diesel-powered vehicles that are efficient. We are doing that.

There other things we need to do too. We need to invest in rail service. We can send from Washington, DC, to Boston, MA, a ton of freight by rail on 1 gallon of diesel fuel. I will say that again. We could send from Washington, DC, to Boston, MA, a ton of freight by rail on 1 gallon of diesel fuel. But we as a government choose not to invest in freight rail and, frankly, to invest very modestly in passenger rail. It is a highly energy-efficient way to move people and goods.

Carper is the very model of a modern major backbencher and not particularly progressive, but on this issue he's absolutely right. And as Barack Obama has shown, offering short-term gimmick fixes do nothing but insult the public. Obama has actually talked about mass transit a little bit as well recently, so I'm hoping this could be a real initiative of his Administration. Maybe Carper could be the legislative point person.