Free Market Pickup Trucks

The next time someone tells you that the free market will take care of everything, you can always point this article where the following statement is made:

Chrysler announced last November that it will slash production this year, but has insisted it will plow[sic] ahead with a redesign of its Dodge Ram pickup and has not adjusted production to deal with the recent slide in the U.S. market.

Are you watching? Are you paying attention? Gas in the United States is predicted to go to $7. Chrysler is scaling back SUV production. But they're still going ahead with a redesign of a pickup truck.

Why, why, why? They're stuck in the mentality of making lots of money off of giant vehicles. If, they surmise, they could only build an even bigger truck with an even larger engine, then they could save the whole business.

That's why we have governments. That's why governments should be making laws, not just to protect the environment, but to protect the auto worker jobs that we've subsidized and nurtured for so long from the stupidity of the monotone droning of the people who run the auto manufacturing companies.

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Do we still need a Carbon Tax?

The idea of the Carbon Tax is to increase the cost of fossil fuels - or at least the burning of fossil fuels - in order to discourage their use. This is a good idea for a number reasons regardless of your stance on anthropogenic global warming. The contribution of fossil fuels to pollution, terrorism, the Bush Administration and all sorts of other evils is well established.

My question is in regards to how much of a carbon tax were we planning on imposing. This idea had its genesis when a barrel of oil was somewhere in the $20 range. Oil just bounced off $140 per barrel. Were we planning on establishing a tax that would make oil 600% more expensive? I find that very difficult to believe, but I never did see any hard numbers from the Carbon Tax people stating where they'd be placing the tax and how much it would have to be.

My impression is that even with a complete shift from corporate and personal income taxes all the way over to a carbon tax, the effective cost of oil would not be more than the current price.

And is the current price enough to change our use of fossil fuels? Just barely.

And does it make sense to still support a carbon tax, given the crushing effect the current price of oil is already having on the lives of lower income people and the economy in general? My suspicion is that introducing a carbon tax now, piling on top of the soaring cost of oil, would prove to be destructively shocking to our way of life.

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Unions and Goodness

Unions have always been a mixed blessing. Historically, unions of workers have given us a lot of the things we hold dear. Reasonable working hours, weekends, benefits, living wages and worker's rights against abuse are all valuable things. When the rights and wages of the lowest people on the ladder are improved, we get two main benefits. One is that the wages of the rest of us go up. The other is that unions shift wealth toward the poorest which helps fuel our mass consumption driven economy as well as improve the education and health possibilities for those with lower incomes.

It's a much more reliable method of improving things than, say, giving massive tax cuts to corporations and wealthy people and hoping that this magically improves the lives of poor people through some unspecified mechanism (usually given the implication-laden title of "trickle down").

But unions have also used their heft to prevent innovation by mechanization, to help workers do their jobs poorly (thus "dealer prep") and to protect workers who are actually lousy at their jobs.

I read this article today and I found it idiotic.

GM is laying off 2600 workers at its truck and SUV plant and Buzz Hargrove, the super powerful union leader, has declared that he won't let it happen.

Mr. Hargrove insisted the U.S. market could not possibly have declined so sharply in such a short period of time that GM would have to break that agreement.

Is he insane? The market for SUVs and trucks could not have declined? Has he seen the price of gasoline? Of course North Americans are finally getting smarter and realizing that the giant vehicles they drive are expensive and irresponsible.

What is the argument here? That no one saw this coming? What you should have been doing, Mr. Union Leader, is negotiating for the past several years, on behalf of your brothers, to have those factories slowly converted over to efficient passenger cars in advance of this very, very obvious impending crisis.

It's that kind of behaviour that frustrates me. There is a place for the Union concept. Democracy simply can not react quickly enough to protect large numbers of workers from large scale abuse - especially with the penchant corporations have shown for trust violations. A Union or Federation can step in and threaten to halt production in order to extract fairness from the corporation rather than having all of the workers uproot their lives to change jobs.

But this is not it. This is not what the Union should be doing - attempting to stave off the unavoidable tide of change. I'm not too worried though, about the plight of these particular workers. I hear there are autoworking jobs elsewhere:

The dramatic shift in U.S. demand benefits Asian-based auto makers, which have dominated the passenger-car side of the business since the 1990s, when Detroit focused the bulk of its product development and investment on SUVs.

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Global Warming Doesn't Matter

Yes, I know that the vast majority of scientists studying global warming have repeatedly told us that the current global warming we are experiencing is caused by human industry. I know that the evidence is in that this increase in temperature could have serious, if not catastrophic, consequences for human life on this planet.

I also know that there are a number of people calling themselves "climate change skeptics", people who spend a lot of time arguing against human-caused global warming using the same techniques that creationists use. I distrust them mainly on the basis of their dishonesty.

I'm just saying that it doesn't matter.

Do you know what the solution is to stopping humanity's contribution to global warming?

We have to stop burning fossil fuels. There are a few other tricks we can do but the biggest contributor, by far, is the burning of oil-based products.

Let's see if we can find any other reasons to stop using fossil fuels:

1. Burning oil and gasoline pollutes the environment.
2. Purchasing oil supports dictatorships in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan and a number of other places.
3. Purchasing oil supports the Bush administration's financial backers.
4. We've killed enough human beings over oil already.
5. Extracting oil from the tar sands in Alberta is going to be extremely destructive to the environment.

So seriously now, let's think about it.

Do we really need another reason to stop burning oil?

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This Week in Trains

This week, a rant of personal greed and selfishness.

Passenger train service needs to cheaper. Think about it. Trains are, by far, the most efficient way to move large numbers of people. Less fuel is consumed. Less pollution is produced. Yes, it will take longer than using an airplane for cross-country hops, but for most short hops it's actually shorter after you factor in all of the nonsense that goes with getting to an airport, checking your baggage, yada yada yada.

Still, train fare for two people is generally more expensive than taking a car, even if you account for wear and tear on the car, insurance, gas and everything.

If the train is such an efficient method of transportation, why is this so?

It's because you don't, up front, pay the true cost of driving your car.

You see, in order to drive a car, you need a series of smooth surfaces over which to drive it. These are often referred to as "roads" or "highways". Highways have overpasses, true marvels of engineering, and cloverleafs, on-ramps, off-ramps, girders, embankments, ditches, lights, digital signs, traffic cops, accidents, ambulances. In fact, a whole lot of the cost of driving your car is hidden away from you and kept quite indirect.

Your taxes dollars are subsidizing the driving of your car.

Imagine if your tax dollars equally subsidized efficient public transportation. How many billions of dollars would be involved there? Some astronomical figure, for certain. Now buses still need roads, but they wouldn't have nearly as many accidents, nor put as much mass on the road. Trains have tracks that need maintenance and have their own digital signs, but those they use quite efficiently and are easier to maintain than a giant network of highways. People would also have to spend at least some their days walking around, which would likely save us some health care dollars.

So, in summary, we ought to be subsidizing public transportation a lot more than we do. As well, we should stop complaining that VIA Rail and other outfits like it "aren't profitable". Neither is the highway system, so what's your point?

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Kyoto, CN Strike, Attack Ads

So many things are happening.

I've overjoyed at the sudden swing the Conservatives have taken toward environmental concerns. It's not something that they wanted to do, but rather something we forced them to do with strong public opinion. Suddenly, they discover, cutting emissions in half by 2050 doesn't seem to be satisfying enough. Of course, we'll have to continue to keep an eye on them to make sure they follow through. Rest assured that this is not a desirable outcome for the party of the rich, wealthy and oil-invested.

On another note, there is a strike going on of all the CN rail workers. If you were to read only the news, you would think that the cause for this strike is that workers, who earn an "average" (look that word up, you don't actually know what it means) of $75k, want a 4% raise. However, if you look more closely, the 4% is only a response to the management's offer of 3%. The problem? Management's offer also includes clauses which allow them to overwork their employees. Would you want to ride a train operated by a guy who works 12 hours, gets 8 hours off, then is required to work 12 more hours? Not I.

I caught a couple of the Conservative attack ads on television. Mostly they're highlighting how the Liberals never really did anything for the environment. I suppose we're supposed to believe that the Conservatives will.

I don't believe any of them. As a citizen, I believe that I have a duty to avoid believing them, just as I have a duty to keep an eye on them.

They are politicians. They care about looking good, raising funds and getting reelected. They do not care about any of the actual issues in their platforms. If you start your analysis of politics from this angle, it makes much more sense. When did the Conservatives suddenly become environmentalists? When we forced the issue. Politicians will only do what we want if he hammer it down their throats and, even then, they will try to get out of it. They'll make laws with loopholes. They'll underfund programs.

NAFTA is probably the best example. The PCs implied that it meant duty-free cross border shopping, when it really meant forcing Canadian workers to compete with sweatshops in third world countries. The plan went ahead, the corporate field were sown with our money, and our elected officials reaped the rewards when they left office.

That's their plan - sneak in to office with some "platform", rig the financial game for their friends, escape to a life of luxury. The only way to stop them is to pay more attention.

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