It's not easy being green (in Michigan)

by: LiberalLucy

Fri Nov 09, 2007 at 13:00:00 PM EST

I'm no Warren Buffet and I'm certainly no Dick DeVos (thank goodness) and as the price of oil continues to climb to all-new highs, the price at the pump has been really hitting me where it really hurts, my wallet. 

Today I cringed when I heard my favorite local lefty talk-radio show host remark that some gas stations in California had already started selling gas for $5.00 a gallon. Are you kidding? Who can possibly afford that!? 

I've already made a visible change to my normal driving habits over the past year. I've switched out renting movies from the local store to either buying them on demand or through Netflix, even though I know it's hurting local businesses. I only allow myself so many trips out per week, whether that means to see friends, run to the store, or errands. If I travel to see family in other parts of the state, I only do so when I'm carpooling with others.

Just last week when I flew out of state from Metro Airport, I made the point of skipping my usual Lansing to Detroit connection, and instead opting for the Michigan Flyer, a service that proudly boasts about how it helps lessen the environmental impact of transportation. 

If I do something particularly extragant with my car (like drive more than 20 minutes to see a friend, take a road trip, etc) friends and family have often heard me say half-joking "You know, everytime we do this, Al Gore sheds a tear."

But I have to ask, how much more can I curtail my life while continuing to be a good environmental steward? I'm very concerned about the environment, and I fully believe in doing my part to lessen my carbon footprint on the earth. However, let's face reality. We live in Michigan, home of the Motor City, the Big Three, not the state where public transportation abounds.

Chrysler: Lay-offs in the "thousands" begin

by: DianeS

Wed Oct 31, 2007 at 19:49:03 PM EDT

DETROIT -- Chrysler LLC began laying off thousands of salaried workers Wednesday as part of an effort to slash costs in the company's new era of private ownership, a spokesman said.

The cuts won't end there. On Thursday, Chrysler planned to announce that the third shift at the Toledo North plant in Ohio will be eliminated in the first quarter of 2008, a reduction of 750 jobs, according to a congressional aide with knowledge of the announcement. The plant makes the Jeep Liberty and wasn't part of recent contract talks between the United Auto Workers union and Chrysler because it has a separate contract.

Continued below the fold...

Pelosi preps Dingell for retirement, sidelines him on CAFE standards

by: David Boyle

Mon Oct 15, 2007 at 03:27:56 AM EDT

  Rep. John Dingell, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, is disappointed a House-Senate committee won't tackle legislation to improve the fuel economy of the nation's vehicles.
  Instead, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has chosen Democratic leaders to write an energy bill -- which would include provisions on fuel economy -- behind closed doors, rather than through a conference committee of House and Senate negotiators. She cited Senate Republican opposition to appointing members.
  "We cannot have a situation where if they don't give us a conference, we don't have a bill," Pelosi said. "With or without a conference, we will proceed." ...
  Dingell wouldn't divulge whether he would mount an effort to kill an energy bill that was too harsh on automakers. "I'm not foreclosing any option," he said. "I don't make the jungle. I just live there." ...

  No, he does make the jungle. Consistently. And now he is reaping the unpleasant fruits of that, though less unpleasant than the deaths that Katrina victims had to suffer, maybe because of global warming (with effects such as increased hurricane damage...) partially caused by Detroit automakers' failure to make better cars--a failure Dingell has been the chief legislative enabler for, for decades.

  Directly or indirectly, Speaker Pelosi is preparing the way for Dingell's "transition out of power"; and that's a good thing, too. Feel free to suggest primary opponents for him beyond those already suggested here.

Judge jolts auto titans with greenhouse gas ruling

by: David Boyle

Thu Sep 13, 2007 at 01:44:02 AM EDT

In a major blow to automakers, a Vermont judge rejected car companies' efforts to block 11 states from adopting California's stricter vehicle emissions requirements.
  It's the latest in a string of legal setbacks automakers face as they try to prevent what they call crippling emissions regulations from taking effect.
  At issue is Vermont's decision, along with nine other states, to adopt California's 2004 tailpipe emission rules. Beginning in 2009, the regulations require automakers to increase the fuel economy of vehicles by about 25 percent to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, which have been linked to global warming. ...
  The decision rejected the automakers['] arguments -- in a case U.S. District Judge William K. Sessions III said largely hinged on whether the regulations were too draconian for automakers to comply with.
  "The court does not find convincing the claims that consumers will be deprived of their choice of vehicles, or that manufacturers will be forced to restrict or abandon their product lines," Sessions wrote. "The court remains unconvinced automakers cannot meet the challenge of Vermont and California's (greenhouse gas) regulations."
  He repeatedly referred to statements Detroit automakers made in the 1970s warning of the peril they faced if they were forced to install catalytic converters. ...
  He also rejected an argument that automakers could be forced to eliminate 65,000 auto jobs in the United States if the regulations took effect. ...
  Environmentalists hailed the 240-page decision. "The judge said baloney to all of Detroit's arguments," said David Bookbinder, a lawyer for Sierra Club who argued the case. "This was another example of Detroit crying wolf." ...

  Not good news for Teh Ding, see DetNews again, Dingell pledges victory in fuel economy 'tussle',

The chairman of the House Energy and Commerce committee said he expected a joint House-Senate conference will take up legislation to increase corporate average fuel economy -- and that he was prepared for a difficult fight but confident of victory.
  "We're going to win this fight," U.S. Rep. John Dingell, D-Dearborn, told a gathering of auto dealers at a speech in Washington. ...
  Dingell said [a] Senate bill imposes "intolerable burdens" on auto companies. ...
  "I go into this tussle comforted (by the support of auto dealers) Go get 'em," he told the dealers. "We're going to win this fight." ...

  Oh is that right, chief.

Chrysler, Ford knock fed's anti-SUV e-mail

by: SharonRB

Sat Sep 01, 2007 at 14:51:27 PM EDT

David Shepardson / Detroit News Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON -- Two U.S. automakers criticized an e-mail sent by a federal agency to 67,000 employees that encouraged them to buy fuel-efficient vehicles and touted several foreign-made models as preferable options.

The e-mail, sent Aug. 17 to employees of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, offered advice on buying new vehicles. It advised making fuel efficiency "a top priority" and reprinted a list of 12 green cars from the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy that didn't include any vehicle from a Detroit automaker. Workers also were urged to consider not buying sport utility vehicles, which are among the most profitable models for Detroit automakers.

"Every new sport utility vehicle on the road produces 60 percent more climate threatening CO2 emissions than a smaller vehicle," said the e-mail, an edition of the department's "Energy News," a quarterly newsletter. "Fortunately, there are efficient options for a consumer to choose from when selecting a vehicle to drive A couple of high profile releases for 2007 are the Toyota Camry Hybrid and the Nissan Altima Hybrid."

More here: http://www.detnews.c...

Dingell throws Tony Soprano at Obama

by: David Boyle

Tue May 15, 2007 at 17:50:34 PM EDT

  "...So he took umbrage today with a speech given last week by U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, an Illinois Democrat who is running for president. In a speech to the Detroit Economic Club, Obama chastised the auto industry for not working harder to achieve better fuel-efficiency standards.
  Dingell used his speech to the same organization to shoot back:
  "I admire Sen. Obama's enthusiasm..? But with all due respect, as the Sopranos would say - I would not travel to Chicago for the purpose of teaching people how to butcher hogs."
  The line drew an enthusiastic response from the crowd, which was much smaller than the audience for Obama's speech. ..."

  Hm.
  ...It is not always good to draw on gangsters, even fictional ones, for wisdom, even in jest? Something to chew on.
  I wonder about Dingell's "ignorant outsider" theme, too; he also implied this about Ward Connerly, and look what happened there.

  There are fascinating reader comments in the Freep thread, as well.

  Don't watch too many gangster shows now, y'all.

Obama's speech at the Detroit Economic Club today

by: SharonRB

Mon May 07, 2007 at 22:31:37 PM EDT

Read the whole speech here. He does a great job addressing the needs of the auto industry, as well as the needs of the country.

Remarks of Senator Barack Obama to the Detroit Economic Club
Detroit, MI | May 07, 2007

America is a country that hasn't come easily. In our brief history, we have been tested by revolution and slavery, war and depression, and great movements for social, civil, and equal rights.

We have emerged from each challenge stronger, more prosperous, and ever closer to the ideals of liberty and opportunity that lay at the heart of the American experiment.

And yet, the price of our progress has always been borne by the struggle and sacrifice of our people - by leaders who have asked ordinary Americans to do extraordinary things; and by generations of men and women who've had the courage to answer that call.

Carrying the load

by: leftfielder

Mon Mar 19, 2007 at 23:35:34 PM EDT

GM's Superbowl Ad: Clever & Harmless or Tasteless & Offensive?

by: Brainwrap

Mon Feb 05, 2007 at 14:40:47 PM EST

http://youtube.com/w...

Realistic and Progressively Solving Detroiters Access to Opportunity

by: dwishinsky

Fri Jan 19, 2007 at 19:38:28 PM EST

This year SMART had a proposal to add a millage to our taxes here in Farmington Hills, I hope everyone joined me by voting against it. But as a Democrat am I not supposed to love the idea of people walking in vibrant urban neighborhoods? Am I not supposed to love the cleansing of our air by taking people off our clogged expressways and putting them on more environmentally friendly buses and trains? That is absolute nonsense. It is a smokescreen of those on the left who are (basically out to lunch) out of touch with reality in many American cities, but in none more so than Detroit. This misplaced idealism of turning Detroit into a New York or Chicago overcomes reality.

Buses are more environmentally unfriendly than cars, when they are empty. Thus the empty SMART and DDOT buses that roam our neighborhoods passengerless are polluting more than the driver going home to Livonia in his Hummer. And with regards to Metro Detroit there is no viable mass transit system that will suddenly have people leaving their cars at home. Why?

 
• Safety. We have a city where there are many suburbanites who haven't been in the City of Detroit for years. How many times did we hear about that on the news when the Super Bowl was in town? Or the World Series? Or even the annual auto show? These people aren't safe in their cars yet you think they'll feel comfortable taking some mass transit line down Woodward when it stops in Highland Park? Somehow I thinketh not.

 
• Radial patterns don't apply. Most mass transit systems follow some form of radial pattern where the system leaves the core of the city outwards. This wouldn't work in Detroit. Ever notice how traffic is awful in certain patches everyday that don't necessarily fit any rhyme or reason (like I-75 at 14 mile in either direction) at any given time? This is because Detroit's traffic patterns are far from the typical suburbs-to-downtown-core seen in most major cities. Detroit has made different "cores" if you were to call them that, like Big Beaver/I-75 in Troy; The Lodge/I-696/Telegraph "mixing bowl" in Southfield; the commercial stretch along Haggerty between 6 Mile and 8 Mile in Livonia/Northville for example. So any system based on a radial pattern wouldn't work. So you'd need some form of suburb to suburb system along with a suburb to downtown system further escalating costs.

 
• We have a car culture. You can't overcome the simple fact that people in Detroit like their cars. You can't walk in most of suburbia if you wanted to. Hall Road has no sidewalks and has such a high speed limit that walking from the Barnes and Noble on the northside of it to Lakeview Mall on the southside would likely result in your very quick death. These sorts of attitudes will not change for a long time, even if you were to overcome the problems mentioned earlier.

 
• Poor people do not gain access to new economic opportunities. The main driving force behind mass transit is to help those who can't afford to own a car gain mobility. Yet in Detroit this would not be possible. Within Detroit jobs are scarce so unless you were to overhaul the city's economic state you would need to have people having access to jobs in the suburbs, which brings us back to the radial problem, how would a transit system (even using a spoke type system of combined buses and trains or electric rail or whatever) serve these people's needs? It wouldn't.

"Anthony Downs, a transportation expert at the Brookings Institution, has projected that doubling the number of people who take mass transit to work (a Herculean achievement) would reduce the number who drive by only around 5 percent. While it unquestionably makes sense to improve service to the transit-dependent, particularly in dense urban neighborhoods, no amount of money will enable us to use transit to meet the needs of most workers. Only cars can do that." (from a Washington Monthly article)

Yet what is a solution to what I see as the most pressing need for some form of mass transit - helping the poor access jobs and improve their economic mobility? That simply put is changing our tax structure to a degree to incorporate tax breaks for the working poor who commute allowing them to afford better and more reliable cars or upkeep cars they already have. It essentially is subsidizing cars for the poor and working to see that they can't get access to those currently inaccessable suburban opportunities. An article in Washington Monthly from October/November of 2005 explains it brilliantly.

  The author, Margy Waller, states as follows, "new jobs tend to be located in ever-expanding suburbs, which are poorly served by mass transit, poor central-city residents find themselves living further and further away from economic opportunities. Evelyn Blumenberg, a professor of urban planning at UCLA, found that car-driving residents of the Watts section of Los Angeles have access to an astounding 59 times as many jobs as their neighbors dependent on public transit. Even more isolated are the car-less low-income families that now live in the suburbs--nearly half of all metropolitan poor." What is startling about this is how similar the Watts neighborhood is to many of Detroit's neighborhoods, and how similar Metro Detroit is to Metro Los Angeles (in terms of commuting habits and car culture). So if someone riding the bus had access to 15 jobs, the person with a car would find access to 885! That is an amazing figure.

She continues to explain that,

"there is reason to believe that not having a car isn't just a consequence of poverty--it's a barrier to escaping it. A significant body of research shows that low-income people with cars work at higher rates, and earn more, than those without...The lack of a car limits opportunities for America's poor in other ways too. It's never easy to be a working single parent, but it's infinitely harder without a car. When you spend three hours a day commuting to work by bus and train, then have to buy groceries and pick up your kids, there isn't much time for anything else--like helping with homework or after-school activities, taking yourself or your family to the doctor when necessary, or even finding a partner to help share the load. And lack of access to a car limits your housing options, making it even harder to move into safer neighborhoods, or ones with better schools. "

"The federal government should offer a tax benefit to anyone who commutes to work and is in the middle to bottom of the income scale--that is, anyone in the 60 percent of U.S. households making less than $52,000 a year. Those who need the credit most would get the most help: Lower-income workers would receive a refund if their credit exceeded the amount of taxes they owe, in the form of a check for up to $3,000. That's enough to help significantly with the purchase and maintenance of a decent, though not fancy, car. Those higher up the income scale would get a dollar-for-dollar credit against taxes owed; a family making $40,000 would get back around $1,000. To avoid punishing those who don't use cars, all workers with commuting expenses--even those who take mass transit--could claim the benefit. "

"in fact, there is reason to believe that it could attract broad support, and help forge some unlikely alliances. Unreliable cars and unpredictable transit are a major contributors to employee tardiness and absenteeism, cutting productivity and profits. Commuting credits would ease that problem, and increase the pool of applicants for low wage jobs, making the credits a natural sell to major employers. And the automakers and the powerful auto unions would surely welcome the prospect of creating a new market for cars.

The political logic may be the most compelling for candidates: Any proposal that involves money in the pocket for this many voters won't lack for public support. In particular, rural and exurban workers who have long been particularly hard hit by this tax on work are a natural constituency for the commuting credit. Indeed, in addition to transforming the lives of America's inner-city poor, commuting credits could also be the first step toward making low- and middle-income voters feel that the federal government is making a difference in their economic well-being."