Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Global Warming [Climatic Change] & Monorails



Memories are like moonbeams...we do with them what we want. Ergo...we can’t allow people to live where they wish.

We must force them into dense urban centers – "smart growth" for our society and culture – despite the fact that most families don’t like to live in dense urban centers.

But is that really why they move to the suburbs? Why do we put up with this?

We have everything we need except the political will: To provide limitless supplies of absolutely clean 3-cent per kilowatt power; To restore the finest highway system in the world to provide high-speed, 24-hour a day on-call doorstep-to-doorstep service; To provide fresh new water supplies to finish the job of greening California; To provide a comprehensive array of housing to fit every budget with a standard of living hitherto unmatched in the history of the world.

But there’s a catch. And it is a big one. It means upsetting the status quo!

It means controversy. It means challenging “the kum-by-ah uber ales” Luddite movement. It means confronting the reactionary anti-mass-transit lobby. It means confronting the pro-growth extremists in our communities. It means upsetting the established order of things. But it has to be done.

In his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon wrote of the last generations of Rome. He called them “Decent, easy men...living off the gifts of the founders.” For a quarter century, we have been living from the gifts of Warren, Knight, Pat Brown and Reagan. We have lived the life of decent, easy men and women. We are today spending more and delivering less as a state than ever before in our moonbeam history.

Dr. Johnson once observed that “When a man is to be hanged in the morning, it concentrates his attention remarkably.” California is about to be hanged if we build any more toll roads. Quit feeding the pockets of the rich, so that they can ruin your, mine, our environment.

A monorail anyone?