While the US will waste a lot of time, money and energy getting there and end up less competitive as a result, most US transportation will decarbonize regardless, although often not as the new transportation blueprint supposes.
Rail in the US is a case where a huge transportation segment is deeply out of step with the rest of the world, and that’s not because the reasons stand up to the slightest scrutiny.
Biofuels are fit for purpose, and we have a lot more resources for them than the requirements. Arguments against them are mostly specious, biased, or based on very stale data.
China spent $546 billion of 2022’s $1.1 trillion USD global green investment, but China is getting about a trillion USD in value out of its investment.
Rail requires a lot more tunnels, and as the data shows, any time you are digging tunnels, fat-tailed risks abound and projects operate more slowly.
As Sheikh Zaki Yamani, a former Saudi oil minister, once said, “The stone age came to an end not for a lack of stones, and the oil age will end, but not for a lack of oil.” But some oil will still be being pumped at the end, and it won’t be heavy, sour, far from water crude.
The US hydrogen strategy was positioned in the wrong federal department. It was put in the hands of people who deal with fossil fuels all day long and have a paradigm of burning them for energy, not a paradigm of electricity for energy. It fails Rumelt’s test for the first thing that makes a good strategy, and so its principles and actions will be failures as well.
All of us, most of the time, wander around on the surface of the Earth. A small percentage travel across rivers, lakes and oceans in boats of various kinds regularly. A smaller percentage than that get above the ground into the skies. And, of course, the tiniest rounding error on a gnat’s hairy thorax get above the atmosphere. So let’s talk about moving around on the ground in this next edition of sexy/unsexy, practical/impractical.
The narrative that Americans and many Europeans share about China and themselves is not aligned with observable reality, and the USA is in significant danger of economic decline even as the world improves.
Many people in the United States probably wonder why our rail network generally sucks. We’re the richest (by some measures) country on the planet, but traveling by train here would be like going back in time decades for many visitors. Japan, China, most of Europe, and even the little island … [continued]
