Steven Chu is Obama’s nominee for Energy Secretary. Here’s what he thinks about gas prices:gas prices
In a sign of one major internal difference, Mr. Chu has called for gradually ramping up gasoline taxes over 15 years to coax consumers into buying more-efficient cars and living in neighborhoods closer to work.
“Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe,†Mr. Chu, who directs the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal in September.
Gas prices in Europe are treble what they are here. Add to that the fact that Europe has better developed rail and public transportation networks, and what you’ve got in essence is a recipe for turning rural America into a depressed hillbilly backwater. Well bethought!
Here’s something Chu never thought of; how ’bout making cities more livealbe so people – WANT to live closer to work? What an asshole. People flee the cities for a reason.
When most Americans say “drain the swamps,” they’re usually referring to wringing the corruption out of their tired, rusting cities, or to killing terrorists in places like Fallujah.
But, when O!’s environmentalists say it, they mean that they’d like to eliminate “red,” “fly-over” America.
This is the Blue City Boys talk. Of course I as a blue collar worker want to live just down the street from my steel mill job. Gary Indiana was such a lovely place to live in the 1950’s. Think Jersey for you NYC people.
Let’s see. No one ever changes jobs, right? No one ever wants to do better, live better, just stay in one place tied to your job with unbreakable bonds of home, schools, and healthcare.
The new “caste” system as in the Europe they love so much. The “Peons” and the “Lords”. It’d make a new Sim game.
Can’t we just encourage, through tax breaks, those that love Europe to move over there and those who love socialism to move to “real” socialist systems, Cuba maybe? They could do it for their children. Call it the Elian Gonzalez “Move your child to a better place, bailout of the USA act”. No deposit, no return, all sales final.
Newsweak today published another in their landmark series of intelligent, nuanced opinions. This one bewailed capitalism. Because, you know, the only solution to markets is to destroy them.
“One of the most enduring symbols of the 2008 economic and financial crisis”, when in fact, Greenspan fell on his bubbles. Yet the glee, it is unbridled. Heaven forbid that when monetary policy proves defective we question monetary policy.
Installing a Socialist on the eve of the biggest surge in Keynesian make-work in the country’s history; that’s some timing. Because The Dollar is unimpeachable as a standard more inherently valuable than wealth itself. It’ll all turn out fine … and the era of conforming behavior by manipulating currencies in favor of pet theories begins.
So wouldn’t that lead to higher population density, which in turn, would cause greater stress on the environment in those areas? O! will bring Grove Parc to the rest of the country. As I’ve said before, you judge a politician by his treatment of his own constituency. Free Rezko!!!
[…] question entirely. And this brings me back once again to my dismay with the Obamarat: like many social engineers, they seem to have little to no appreciation of Unintended Consequences–and many of our […]
Mossberg,
The increased stress on the environment produced by high population densities is a feature to Obama, not a bug.
Like so many of the Prog’s vocal factions, the environmental movement is driven by urban-dwellers’ compensations for their packed, polluted, high-energy lifestyles. As such, an intended consequence of packing indigents into the cities will be the fortification of this sort of compensatory faction.
The history of the fall of Rome begins when Rome’s subsidized city-residents wrung-out all the taxes they could from the outlying rural areas. In order to keep the rusting city’s patronages functioning, the Roman army was forced to expand its tax-base ever farther until the empire crumbled under corruption, sloth, and invasion.
Chicago and Detroit’s dying job-bases are exhibit “A.” The “Neo-Urban” movement’s agenda is redolent of Rome’s dying perogatives.
And our new President, once caught posing beside Roman columns, can’t be unaware of this historic parallel.
Oh, yes he can!
If these self-compensating urban progs ever figure out how to lobby Congress, we’ll be in real trouble.
This is as good a place as any to remind you all that CA’s Attorney General, Jerry Moonbeam Brown, declared war on suburbia five minutes after he took office. He has sued nasty red counties over land use, demanding higher density housing located near public transportation and the CA Socialist legislators are also trying to use hold road funds hostage to such plans. “Hello? San Bernardino County? Either stop building single family homes or your crumbling roads will never get fixed.”
But you look to the high density urban centers they want to shove the middle class into — Say Los Angeles, and what you find is the uber rich in high security, high priced, high rise condos or you find small, WWII era homes with bars on the windows in neighborhoods where the sounds at night aren’t an occasional barking dog but gunfire.
Sure, but let’s not go overboard, Darleen. On the other hand, Gov. Moonbeam did head to the outback to biff Linda Ronstadt and off the coast in Monkey Business to bang that other chick. I’m not asserting a causal connection. I’m just saying.
We’re too spread out to have a rail system like in Europe, anyway.
I do not understand the push to make us more like the Euros. They have many more problems than we do. Why emulate a clearly failed/failing philosophy?
Now, Andy. The French are on their fifth republic, while we’re still on our first.
Think of how much more experience they have!
Oh Boy! MORE regulation! THAT’s gonna solve the problem. Everybody! Sacrifice, shoulder to the wheel, I gotta get to work.
52% of the people in this country believe that bullshit.
Too bad. At least Chu likes nuclear power.
The highest population density in Europe is in the Netherlands, 395 per square mile. Great Britian is 246, Germany 242.
In the U.S. New Jersey is highest, 1,174. The average is at 31.
If Brown and Chu only wish to bring our average up to match Germany’s to support their public transportation visions we will require 2.4 billion people.
You can count on me not to be driving to work.
“Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe,â€Â/Chu
Being charitable, can’t we just say “climber”?
We’re too spread out to have a rail system like in Europe, anyway.
That’s the “problem” the Proggs want to “correct”, Andy.
The so-called “suburban sprawl” is a Leftist nightmare. There’s just too many people out in the countryside to be controlled 24/7. “Encouraging” us to move back to urban centers by making suburban living unattractive with onerous regulation and taxation is what we’re seeing the beginnings of here.
You know, I can’t wait to find out who’s going to grow their arugula in the arcologies. Of course, most of them think food magically appears on store shelves. Witness the outrage over turkey slaughtering recently.