Madison Peak Oil Group

Tuesday, August 29, 2006

This blog does not intend to endorse any candidates in this fall's elections; yet, it's important to know their positions on peak oil and appropriate responses. It is in this spirit that the blog includes an editorial piece from The Capital Times with Dave Zweifel's perception of Mark Green's position on rebuilding American's railroads:

If you're among the growing legions who see the need to bring viable passenger rail service to this part of the country, you're not going to want to vote for Mark Green for governor.

Green has obviously spent too much time with the Washington faction that doesn't mind throwing countless billions to the highway cabal, but is "horrified" whenever Amtrak comes looking for a small handout that might make riding in a train just a tad more convenient.

In fact, according to a story on Wisconsin Public Radio earlier this week, Green claimed to have never heard of the years-long initiative to get high-speed rail into the Midwest, particularly in the Chicago-Milwaukee-Madison-Minneapolis corridor.

Now that, for a man who wants to be the governor of our state, is nothing short of astounding.
Dave Zweifel: Green utterly in the dark about rail
Photo by Associated Press
An Amtrak train gets ready to head out from Portland. Me.

When Mark Green was in the Legislature, after all, it was Tommy Thompson, the Republican governor of Wisconsin, who first proposed bringing high-speed rail into our state and became one of its biggest champions.

Green further told WPR that he worries about the deficits that passenger rail is running in this country, obviously oblivious to the reasons why. He doesn't know, for instance, that potential rail passengers have but one time choice per day to catch a train or that whenever there's a problem with a freight train, Amtrak gets shoved to the side. The Bush administration and its supporters in Congress like Green himself have succeeded in starving passenger rail to make sure it can't succeed.

His answer, like that of his Wisconsin Republican colleague to the south, James Sensenbrenner, is to claim that the private sector ought to run passenger rail, as if that hasn't been tried and miserably failed before. If private interests ought to be paying for and running the rails (as, of course, the freight lines do), then perhaps the private interests who clog our public highways with longer and bigger trucks ought to be building and owning their own roads. Or why not advocate that the airlines ought to pay for their own airports?

While Mark Green is making uninformed comments about passenger rail service (I wonder if he's ever ridden a train), Jim Doyle is pushing the feds to get behind the Midwest High Speed initiative. He's even advocated extending high-speed passenger rail from Milwaukee to Green Bay in Green's own congressional district, something Thompson did too.

But Green is probably not aware of that either.