Tag: Governor Brown

Sunday Train has covered the California HSR project on a number of occasions in the past. However, there was no special attention given to what was widely covered at the time as the “end of California HSR”, when a judge ruled that the proposed Business Plan did not meet the terms of the Prop1A(2008) which governed the sale of much of the $9m in state bond authority which had passed in 2008. The Sacramento Bee covered the issue at the time, including the appeal of the ruling to the Supreme Court.

And the reason the Sunday Train did not cover that court judgement is IANDL (I Aint No Dang Lawyer), so I was waiting to see what actually happened with respect to funding for the project. And now it appears to me that funding for the original segment from north of Fresno to the outskirts of Bakersfield has been secured, with the news that part of the Budget deal has secured Cap and Trade funding for the HSR project.

More on what this means, below the fold.

It’s a quite odd alliance. The Sierra Club is fighting the Climate Suicide Club both on the side of Supply, with the fight against the Keystone XL pipeline as one example and the fight against the establishment of Coal Export Terminals in the Pacific Northwest and on the side of Demand, with the Beyond Oil campaign, which in the Green Transportation component promises among other points that: “The Sierra Club will:

• Ensure that all Americans have access to safe, affordable, clean transportation options. …”

And now the Director of Sierra Club California, Kathryn Phillips, has stepped up her attacks on the High Speed Rail project from “expressions of serious concern” to giving direct support for the attack from the Legislative Analyst’s Office that is working in concert with the Tea Party attack that is their most promising hope for killing the project :

“Inherent in AB 32 is that we need to act sooner rather than later,” said Kathryn Phillips, the Sierra Club’s California director. “The problem with taking that [cap-and-trade] money and applying it to high-speed rail is that we don’t anticipate that we’re going to get those benefits – reductions in greenhouse gas emissions – in the short-term. Given how urgent the problem is and has become, and how much we’re seeing the effects of climate change in this state, especially in water availability, it feels irresponsible to not apply that money to those programs that will get you greenhouse gas emissions reductions now.”

Given that we cannot feasibly arrive at a carbon neutral energy generation and transportation system within the next seven years, this implies that we should abandon the pursuit of a carbon neutral generation and transportation system and content ourselves with fighting for a slower rate of suicide as a national industrial economy than the faster rate of suicide that Big Oil, Big Coal and the rest of the Climate Suicide Club is pushing for.

Indeed, given that Sierra Club California had an official position in support of Prop1a which got the California HSR project moving , this could well be as strong an attack on the California HSR project that Kathryn Phillips is in a position to make.

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

As I mentioned in last week’s Sunday Train, the California HSR Authority came out with a revised draft Business Plan.

And why do you revise a draft Business Plan? Because some people suggested some modifications to your previous draft Business Plan might be in order … for instance, if there’s a possibility that you cannot get bonds authorized to start work on the part of the corridor where the Federal Government has already put some funding on the table.

The new, revised, draft Business Plan seems to mark the final passing of the baton from the Judge Kopp absolutist vision of the what an HSR “simply has to be” to the more grounded, realistic vision of Governor Brown …

… and in the process of dragging the HSR Authority back into touch with reality, it is quite possible that Governor Brown has saved the California HSR project.

There are two qualifiers here. The first is that without an account of someone privy to the details of the Governor’s intervention, we won’t know what changes were things the California HSR was on track to doing anyway, and what changes were pushed upon them. But even there, what “the HSR Authority wanted to do” was likely heavily influenced by the changing of the guard from Schwarzenegger appointees to Brown appointees at the Authority.

The second is that getting to work is not yet a done deal. Supporters of the project ~ whether ongoing supporters or those won over by the newly revised plan ~ still need to work to help see the project through to construction of the first construction segment.

The devil is in the details, so we go chasing the devil below the fold.