This is the text of a talk I gave
yesterday at a rally and die in outside a Seattle Mariner’s game, recalling the
Lac-Mégantic oil train explosion July 6, 2013.
We did it at the ballgame to call out the fact BNSF is running the same
explosive oil trains by events attended by tens of thousands, posing the danger
of far more deaths than the 47 which occurred in the Quebec border town. I
spoke about solutions to move us beyond oil, ranging from electric vehicles to
better transit and affordable housing near jobs, as well as the need to stop
road-building binges such as the one Washington State Legislature just voted to
fund. Citizens need to hold politicians’
feet to the fire for better alternatives.
We are here
today to honor the memories of 47 people who died at Lac-Mégantic
two years ago when their town was incinerated by a runaway oil train. The particular tragedy is that they died for
no good reason. They were a human sacrifice made to maintain the age of
oil-powered transportation.
And let’s
be clear, oil is a transportation issue.
Relatively little is burned to generate electricity. But 97% of the world’s transportation
vehicles run on petroleum. We need to
keep oil in the ground to save our climate, to keep explosive oil trains from
running through our communities, and to stop environmentally destructive oil
extraction in the Arctic, the tar sands and the oil shales. To do this we need to stop relying on oil to
run our cars, buses, trucks and trains.
First, we
need to shift most of our ground vehicles from oil to electricity, and we need
to generate that electricity from renewable sources such as the sun and
wind. We are just at the dawn of the new
electric vehicle age. EV’s are just a
tiny fraction of all cars sold. But worldwide EV sales
went up by almost four times in 2014 to 360,000, and they are holding at
that rate this year even with lower gas prices.
Every major automaker has an EV program. Costs are coming down and range
is improving. Within five to seven years
EVs will be cost competitive with gasoline vehicles. They will be a mass market option.
Fully
electric city buses are also on the way.
We can electrify transit fleets.
We also can electrify railroads, as is already done in much of Europe
and Asia. I am working with a Backbone
Campaign project called Solutionary
Rail aimed at running railroads on renewable electricity, taking freight
back from trucks and roads and restoring rail as a major option for intercity
passenger travel.
We have the
renewable energy sources to run our vehicles.
Solar and wind energy are now becoming competitive with fossil fuel
electricity. Since
2013 the world has added more renewable energy each year than fossil energy,
and the gap continues to grow. By 2050,
and we hope sooner, solar is projected to be the world’s biggest energy source.
To meet the climate challenge, which demands we reduce
carbon emissions at least six percent a year, we need to accelerate these
trends with public policies such as carbon pricing and direct support for
purchases. But the point is we have the technologies we
need to get out of oil-fueled transportation and fossil fuels in general. We just need to beat back the power of the
fossil fuel industry that wants to keep us hooked on their climate twisting
products.
We can make
our energy sources clean. But we can’t
stop there. We must also use less
energy. We want the cars we drive to be
electric, but we also want there to be less need to drive cars. We don’t just want to replicate our
car-choked sprawling cities on electric drive.
We need to change our communities to be places where there is not so
much drive to drive. How do we do this?
We need
much better mass transit and public transportation service, much as European
and Asian cities already have. We should
have bus service at least every 10-15 minutes during the day and evening on
major routes. We should also start to
create bike lanes fully separated from traffic as they have in cities like
Amsterdam and Rotterdam, where bike commuting is a major option. That means taking out parking strips to
create bike lanes.
We need to
fight for better transit and bike access.
We need to take part in city politics to make this happen. We supposedly have a climate
plan in Seattle that will reduce our auto carbon pollution over 80 percent
by 2030. But it isn’t
making its way into the city’s draft land use plan, which only projects a
23% reduction by 2035. We are already
falling far short on our city climate goals.
We need to hold our city officials’ feet to the fire to begin making
real carbon reductions, and transportation is the biggest challenge. 350 Seattle
will be doing just that. Come join us to
help make it happen.
There is a
huge social justice angle to all this. More
and more people cannot afford to own an automobile. We need to provide them with decent transit
and biking options. We also need to create more affordable housing near
jobs. People who work in Seattle
increasingly can’t afford to live in Seattle.
They are being pushed out of the city to make long commutes to
work. We should support Councilmember Kshama Sawant’s campaigns for rent control
and for a bond issue to build affordable housing. Affordable housing and public transportation
options are where climate meets justice meets oil reduction.
Finally, we
just need to stop building new roads. The Washington state legislature just
passed a bill funding one
of the biggest road building binges in Washington state history. Nearly $9 billion for new roads compared to a
paltry $650 million for transit and biking.
Most of our Democratic Party state legislators voted for it, and Gov.
Jay Inslee supported it. Greenest
governors do not support massive road building binges. Study after study shows the more roads you build, the more
traffic increases. For this reason
350 Seattle joined with Sierra Club, WASHPIRG and former Seattle Mayor Mike
McGinn to oppose the transportation package.
We lost this one, but we need to come back and insist on a transportation
policy that emphasizes alternatives to the automobile.
We can move
out of oil in transportation. We have
the solutions that provide us with clean fuels, and which allow us to use less
fuel overall. We don’t need to sacrifice
people like those who died at Lac-Mégantic, nor do we need to sacrifice our
waters and oceans to oil spills, or our climate to devastating disruptions. We just need to act as citizens to demand the
policies and investments that will make the change. Come join us in making those demands.
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