America’s “Futurama” is defunct. The famous walk-through diorama of a car-and-suburb world, imagineered by Norman Bel Geddes for General Motors at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, has weathered into a dreary emblem of our national backwardness. While GM bleeds to death on a Detroit street corner, the steel-and-concrete Interstate landscape built in the 1950s and 1960s is rapidly decaying into this century’s equivalent of Victorian rubble.

As we wait in potholed gridlock for the next highway bridge to collapse, the French, the Japanese, and now the Spanish blissfully speed by us on their sci-fi trains. Within the next year or two, Spain’s high-speed rail network will become the world’s largest, with plans to cap construction in 2020 at an incredible 6,000 miles of fast track. Meanwhile China has launched its first 200 mile-per-hour prototype, and Saudi Arabia and Argentina are proceeding with the construction of their own state-of-the-art systems. Of the larger rich, industrial countries, only the United States has yet to build a single mile of what constitutes the new global standard of transportation.

From day one, Barack Obama campaigned to redress this infrastructure deficit through an ambitious program of public investment: “For our economy, our safety, and our workers, we have to rebuild America.”

Originally he proposed to finance this spending by ending the war in Iraq. Although his present commitments to a larger military and an expanded war in Afghanistan seem to foreclose any reconversion of the Pentagon budget, he continues to emphasize the urgency of an Apollo-style program to modernize highways, ports, rail transit, and power grids.

Public works, he also promises, can put the public back to work. His “Economic Rescue Plan for the Middle Class” vows to “create 5 million new, high-wage jobs by investing in the renewable sources of energy that will eliminate the oil we currently import from the Middle East in 10 years, and we’ll create 2 million jobs by rebuilding our crumbling roads, schools, and bridges.”

   Of course, Bill Clinton entered the White House with a similarly ambitious plan to rebuild the derelict national infrastructure, but it was abandoned after Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin convinced the new president that deficit reduction was the true national priority. This time around, a much more powerful and desperate coalition of interests is aligned to support the Keynesian shock-and-awe of major public works.

***
Rolling Out the Dozers:

Since the Paulson bailout plan has become so much expensive spit in the wind, and with bond spreads now premised on the possibility of double-digit unemployment over the next 18 months, massive new federal spending has become a matter of sheer economic survival. As innumerable influentials - from New York Times columnist David Brooks to House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi - have argued, a crash program of infrastructure repair and construction, likely to include some investment in the new power grids required to bring more solar and wind energy online, is the “win-win” approach that will garner the quickest bipartisan support.

It has also been portrayed as the only lifeboat in the water for the ordinary steerage passengers in our sinking economy. The emergent Washington consensus seems to be that those five million green jobs can actually come later (after we save GM’s shareholders), but that infrastructure spending - if resolutely pushed through the lame-duck Congress or adopted in Obama’s first 100 days - can begin to pump money into the crucial construction and manufacturing sectors of the economy before the end of next winter.

Unlike Comrade Bush’s “socialist” efforts to save Wall Street, a public-works strategy for national recovery has had broad ideological respectability from the days of Alexander Hamilton and Abraham Lincoln to those of Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. If Democrats can brag about the proud heritage of the Works Progress Administration and the Public Works Administration from the era of the Great Depression (ah, those magnificent post offices and parkways), there are still a few Republicans who remember the Golden Age of interstate highway construction that commenced in the 1950s with President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Indeed since the national shame of Hurricane Katrina, Americans have become outspokenly nostalgic about competent federal governments and magnificent public achievements.

The answer is: no, not at this stage of our national emergency. I’m not an infrastructure-crisis denialist, but first things first. We are now at a crash site, and our priority should be to save the victims, not change the tires or repair the fender, much less build a new car. In the triage situation that now confronts the president-elect, keeping local schools and hospitals open should be the first concern, rebuilding bridges and expanding ports would come next, and rescuing bank shareholders at the very end of the line.

Inexorably, the budgets of schools, cities, and states are sinking into insolvency on a scale comparable to the early 1930s. The public-sector fiscal crisis - a vicious chain reaction of falling property values, incomes, and sales - has been magnified by the unexpectedly large exposure of local governments and transit agencies to the Wall Street meltdown via complex capital lease-back arrangements. Meanwhile on the demand side, the need for public services explodes as even prudent burghers face foreclosure, not to speak of the loss of pensions and medical coverage. Although the public mega-deficits of California and New York may dominate headlines, the essence of the crisis - from the suburbs of Anchorage to the neighborhoods of West Philly - is its potential universality.

Certainly, in such a rich country, wind farms and schools should never become a Sophie’s choice, but the criminal negligence of Congress over the past months should alert us to the likelihood that such a choice will be made - with disastrous results for both human services and economic recovery.

***
Saving Schools and Hospitals:

Congress naturally loves infrastructure because it rewards manufacturers, shippers, and contractors who give large campaign contributions, and because construction sites can be handsomely bill-boarded with the names of proud sponsors. Powerful business lobbies like the National Industrial Transportation League and the Coalition for America’s Gateways and Trade Corridors stand ready to grease the wheels of their political allies. In addition, if the past century of congressional pork-barrel methods is any precedent, infrastructural spending typically resists coherent national planning or larger cost-benefit analyses.

Yet saving (and expanding) core public employment is, hands-down, the best Keynesian stimulus around. Federal investment in education and healthcare gets incomparably more bang for the buck, if jobs are the principal criterion, than expenditures on transportation equipment or road repair.

For example, $50 million in federal aid during the Clinton administration allowed Michigan schools to hire nearly 1,300 new teachers. It is also the current operating budget of a Tennessee school district made up of eight elementary schools, three middle schools, and two high schools.

On the other hand, $50 million on the order book of a niche public transit manufacturer generates only 200 jobs (plus, of course, capital costs and profits). Road construction and bridge repair, also very capital intensive, produce about the same modest, direct employment effect.

  One of the most likely targets for a Congressional stimulus plan is light-rail construction. Street-car systems are enormously popular with local governments, redevelopment agencies, and middle-class commuters, but generally they operate less efficiently (per dollar per passenger) than bus systems, and at least 40% of the capital investment leaks overseas to German streetcar builders and Korean steel companies.

   If, after saving kindergartens and county hospitals, we someday hope to ride the fast train, then we need to rebuild the antiwar movement on broader foundations. The president-elect’s original proposal for funding domestic social investment through downsizing the empire offers a brilliant starting point for basing economic growth on an economic bill of rights (as advocated by Franklin Roosevelt in 1944) instead of imperial over-reach and Pharaonic levels of military waste.

——–

Mike Davis is the author of “In Praise of Barbarians: Essays Against Empire” (Haymarket Books, 2008) and “Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb” (Verso, 2007). He is currently working on a book about cities, poverty, and global change.

 http://www.carbonsolutionsamerica.com

Why Carbon Solutions America?
Carbon Solutions America is an independent climate change consulting and project management firm. We specialize in conducting carbon footprints, overseeing the design and implementation of greenhouse gas reduction and sustainability strategies, and managing the generation of carbon, energy efficiency and renewable energy credits.

***

 This is obviously in anticipation of a changing us attitude.

What to expect: The energy policies of President Barack Obama - they write.
President-elect Barack Obama intends to proceed with his ambitious energy plan that could reduce US CO2 levels 80% below 1990 levels by 2050.  Obama hopes to strengthen the fledgling US CO2 trading market and keep CO2 prices in the US competitive with prices in the EU.  Among his climate and energy proposals:
·  Obama will enact an aggressive plan to reduce electricity demand by 15% from the DOE’s projected 2020 levels, saving consumers $130 billion, and reducing carbon emissions by five billion tons through 2030.
·  The administration will set a goal to ensure that all new buildings are carbon neutral by 2030, and implement a national goal of improving energy efficiency in new buildings by 50%, and existing buildings by 25%, over the next decade.
·  Obama will require 10% of US electricity to be generated with renewable sources by 2012, and 25% by 2025.
·  Obama will invest heavily in the national electricity grid, implementing smart metering, distributed storage, and other energy requirements to accommodate a new energy mix. He will also “flip” incentives so that utilities and their shareholders will make more money for being efficient and reliable than they do now by increasing capacity. (This is often referred to as “de-coupling”).

Registered With - The World Bank Carbon Finance Unit. We expect that this organization, based in Florida and Louisiana, is intent on getting involved in sugar-cane ethanol.

Contact Info
Phone :
561-953-8960

Fax:
561-953-8961

E-mail:
 info at emailcsa.com

November 18, 2008, an evening at the old Woolworth Building across from New York City Hall, ay the NYU Center for Global Affairs, Which is part of the New York University School of Continuing And Professional Studies.

This was the second evening, in a series of four such evenings, in a joint program with Foreign Affairs Editor James F. Hoge Jr.

The TITLE OF THE EVENING WAS CHALLENGES FOR THE NEXT ADMINISTRATION - but the content was anything but that.

The two members of the panel, chaired by Mr. Hoge, in speaking order, were:

Jacob Weisberg, Chairman and Editor-in-Chief, Slate Group that is run by The Washington Post Company; Columnist, The Financial Times. Since 2006 he serves on the Board of the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME).
He also wrote: “The Bush Tragedy” - on The  New York Times Best Sellers’ List (2008); “in an Uncertain World” he co-authored with former Secretary of the Treasury Robert E. Rubin (2003); ‘In Defense of Government” (1996).

Philip Gourevitch, Editor, Paris Review; Staff writer, New Yorker. he also wrote - “Standard Operating Procedure” (2008) and “A Cold Case” (2001), that were translated into ten languages; “We wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (1998).

Both these speakers are terrific journalists.

To be fair to Mr. Hoge, who himself is a terrific journalist, and under him as editor  his bimonthly magazine has pocketed four Pulitzers, he called this series of evenings “In Print” and made sure that all above mentioned five books were available for sale last night.

My problem was that the evening did not live up to the title that implied the suggestion that it had anything to offer to an incoming new Administration. as I said in Private to Messrs. Weisberg and Hoge, “the evening did cover very well what was done and should not have been done - but had nothing to offer to what should have been done but was not done.” I admit that I chewed their ears, but this was friendly criticism - this because I think that both are capable of doing much more then selling books about past mistakes - they really do have the intellect to suggest the right way in areas that do not surface if we only point fingers at the terrible disgrace of Abu Ghuraib and Guantanamo, and focus on the psychology of President Bush in order to figure out his kind of leadership. January 20, 2009 George W. Bush Will Be History and Obama will be left not just with needed corrections but with a country and a world in need of new direction.

Jacob Weisberg’s bestseller is a terrific research of the Prescott Bush and Walker family roots - he leads us to a better understanding of the US isolation on the world map. on the other hand, humanist Philip Gurevitch looks at the atrocities committed, explains why, and passes correctly the blame to all of us. he is right and the fact that the questions from the audience delved further into these realities, just shows how he and Mr. Hoge managed to score the points that clearly state - WE MUST HAVE BETTER PRISONS IN THE FUTURE AND MAKE SURE THAT SUBHUMAN BEHAVIOR IS NOT TOLERATED.

But now my point? Is it a more humane behavior in regard to suspects - even if we rethink this whole concept of terrorism -  is this the promise of the Obama horizon?

***

I sat there through one and a half hours without hearing the word oil even once. Climate Change was not mentioned. The financial crisis was not mentioned - the whole set of crises (in plural) of the whole US economy and what it did to the rest of the global economy was not investigated - simply said - absolutely nothing with relevance to Obama came up during the evening beyond the obvious areas that we will improve prisons and return to be humans.

I suggest thus, that the terrific members of last night’s panel start considering that when the Financial institutions collapsed, and the figures of GDP and stock values fell to more realistic values - indeed not a single dollar was actually lost or taken out of circulation. What I mean is that those dollars did not exist at all. When you play the derivatives Ponzi game with mortgages based on loans that you know will never be repaid, a fictitious gain caused by a sell at a higher level - has not created additional wealth. It was a fiction of the imagination of people that were very happy with the ongoing system. Obama has to restart an economy from a new reading of the reality - here you have a vast field to cultivate with new and positive ideas - yes ask Stiglitz, Soros, Buffett, and write it up for Obama, and please come to tell us this at NYU also.

Further, talking for one and a half our, on what was basically Iraq, and not mentioning that the war was a war for securing a source of oil, then change the Middle East that all other sources of oil continue to be nice and safe - all this at the time we know the use of oil undermines world geography and human security - not because of lack of oil - but rather because of the use of oil - this is very disingenuous.

I do not want to say that the arguments were fake - no they were not fake - but the goal was fake and presents the danger that instead of waking us up to the real world, a meeting like the one of last night just puts us to sleep in a different bed, where we will have a new set of nightmares. I trust Obama Will try to build new doors when he moves to the White House.

nbsp;http://www.truthout.org/111808U

Obama Addresses Global Warming Summit Of US Governors in Los Angeles - via video.
Tuesday 18 November 2008, by: Foon Rhee, The Boston Globe.

Barack Obama made a surprise presentation to the Governors’ Global Climate Summit in Los Angeles.

Through the magic of video, President-elect Barack Obama  encourages governors and others today to tackle global warming - an issue he highlighted during the campaign.

***

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California is hosting a two-day summit, drawing several fellow governors plus more than 600 environmental officials and activists from around the world.

Obama is pledging to make America more energy independent and to also slash carbon emissions by focusing on alternative sources such as wind and solar. He is also vowing to work more cooperatively with other nations on climate change.

“Few challenges facing America - and the world - are more urgent than combating climate change,” he says in the video. “The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear. Sea levels are rising. Coastlines are shrinking. We’ve seen record drought, spreading famine, and storms that are growing stronger with each passing hurricane season. Climate change and our dependence on foreign oil, if left unaddressed, will continue to weaken our economy and threaten our national security.

Obama continues that “too often, Washington has failed to show the same kind of leadership. That will change when I take office. My presidency will mark a new chapter in America’s leadership on climate change that will strengthen our security and create millions of new jobs in the process.

“That will start with a federal cap and trade system,” he says. “We will establish strong annual targets that set us on a course to reduce emissions to their 1990 levels by 2020 and reduce them an additional 80 percent by 2050. Further, we will invest $15 billion each year to catalyze private sector efforts to build a clean energy future. We will invest in solar power, wind power, and next generation biofuels. We will tap nuclear power, while making sure it’s safe. And we will develop clean coal technologies.

“This investment will not only help us reduce our dependence on foreign oil, making the United States more secure. And it will not only help us bring about a clean energy future, saving our planet. It will also help us transform our industries and steer our country out of this economic crisis by generating five million new green jobs that pay well and can’t be outsourced.”

The world’s environmental ministers plan to meet in Poland in two weeks. “While I won’t be president at the time of your meeting and while the United States has only one president at a time, I’ve asked Members of Congress who are attending the conference as observers to report back to me on what they learn there,” Obama says.

The United Nations reported on Monday that carbon emissions from industrialized countries stabilized in 2006 after six years of growth. The report, however, did not cover fast-growing nations, including China and India, that are an increasingly significant source of greenhouse gases.

———-

Please, do not expect President-Elect Obama to semnd such a video to Poznan - you just do not do this sort of intervention at a meeting outside the US borders.

Leading article (Editorial) of The Independent of London: The US car industry is stalled on a road to nowhere, But any rescue with public money should come with strict conditions.

Wednesday, 19 November 2008

In olden times, when the United States was lauded as an engine of global enterprise and innovation, the ageing behemoth of its domestic car industry was conveniently forgotten. While the age of coal and steel was allowed to pass, leaving metal ghost towns and destitute communities behind, the US car industry somehow lumbered on. It even enjoyed a late and unexpected blooming when American families embraced those thirsty SUVs in the last flush of low fuel prices and rising incomes.

Credit crunch and recession between them have now confronted the US car industry with harsh reality. Sales of new cars have plummeted, as they have elsewhere. And when Americans do buy a new car, it is increasingly smaller, more economical – and foreign. Until recently, the “big three” US manufacturers – Chrysler, Ford and GM – commanded more than half the domestic market; they now account for only a little more than 20 per cent.

That the industry has survived pretty much unreconstructed to this point reflects the special place that the US car industry occupied not just in the American economy, but in American politics – and American hearts. Henry Ford’s Model T is part of the American national myth, like the coast-to-coast road trip, the drive-in and out-of-town shopping malls that presuppose car ownership. The industry’s lobbying power in Washington was, and remains, ferocious.

As is clear from the arguments now raging in the US Congress about what to do with the “big three”, they are seen, rather like certain finance houses once were, as simply too big to fail. It is not just that between them they directly employ 250,000 people, but that the plants are for the most part concentrated in a single, already depressed, area around Detroit, and that – according to industry lobbyists at least – as many as 4 million other jobs depend on them. Without the $25bn the industry is seeking, a whole region could be condemned to penury overnight.

In other ways, though, the car industry’s plight is not unique. It also exposes one great failing of the American way of doing things.

The “big three” have become terminally uncompetitive, not just because more attractive foreign products have captured the market, but because so much of the profit on any sale pays for the health insurance and benefits of retired employees.

Car workers in their time enjoyed some of the best terms available to US manual workers. But the economic model that supported them is no longer viable.

There is a school of thought that believes bankruptcy, for all the human cost, would be the soundest option. They cite the failed bailouts of British Leyland, among others. As the US Senate enters the second day of its two-day debate today, however, this “tough-love” option looks the least likely. The only question seems to be whether – as the Democrats argue – the car industry should be given a slice of the rescue already agreed for the financial sector, or whether, as the Republicans say, it should come from money already earmarked for developing fuel-efficient vehicles.

The industry insists this is too restrictive and would be nothing like enough. But more rigorous testing of the industry’s arguments might be in order before more subsidies are approved.

Of course, many groups have an interest in getting a rescue approved before a new, lobby-averse, President takes office on 20 January, and the transition is an uncertain time.

But a more far-sighted solution that minimised state involvement, while encouraging reform, might be preferable to a hasty attempt to please everyone, even if the “big three” had to wait a little longer.

 At www.SustainabiliTank.info we keep saying this since the beginning of the year - December 2008 there will still be the Paula Dobriansky UN delegation and as such nothing will change and the meeting is a deliberate waste with UN personnel just creating travel mileage CO2 and hot air. That was the case in Bali, and this will be the case in Poznan.

The solution was easy - postpone Poznan Meeting to April 2009 so some start of a decision becomes possible and the needed input for Copenhagen in December 2009 becomes feasible.

The UN Secretary-general is touting the Copenhagen Roadway that starts with Poznan in order to come up with a Kyoto II. We heard from Danish Prime Minister that if there is no Kyoto II there will be a better Copenhagen I, but we told him that what he will get, because of the timing, rather a Poznan II. Now Yvo de Boer, head of the UNFCCC office in Bonn, plainly agrees with our estimate when he realizes in public that the US has only one President at a time - and he well knows that there is no climate change business with US President N0. 43, and before Obama takes over from Bush, there will not be any negotiations. (period.!)

Oh! yes! UNSG Ban Ki-moon will take the paper we just posted, that he somehow thought to bring to the attention of the G-20 in Washington DC at their November 14th meeting - and read it at the opening of the COP-14 of the UNFCCC on December 1 in Poznan. He will then turn around smiling and say that the world has heard how important the subject is.

AND THAT WILL BE IT - and Yvo de Boer just declared that he understands that - that will be it!

Strangely, last night at an event for the Pacific Island States, a person representing a UN body, To be fair to him I do not divulge which important UN affiliate he represents, he told me that Obama will go to Poznan not as President-elect but as Senator (you know, like Al Gore, Timothy Wirth, and Bob Kerry went to  Rio in 1992.) I just did not have the heart to tell the gentleman that next week Obama will not be a Senator anymore. He leaves the Senate so someone else can be appointed and gain in seniority - this is another right and easily predictable thing we know. This story just shows how deep the UN lives in the unreality of its comfortable cocoon.

———–

OSLO (Reuters) November 17, 2008 - President-elect Barack Obama will not attend United Nations talks in Poland next month working on a new treaty for fighting global warming, as per the the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat.

“There is not going to be an Obama delegation in Poznan,” Yvo de Boer, head of the Secretariat, told a news conference in Germany that was also shown on the Internet. The 190-nation talks will be held from December 1-12 in the Polish city of Poznan.

“There is one president at a time,” he said. Obama will take over from President George W. Bush on January 20, 2009.”

After Obama won the presidency last month, de Boer expressed hopes that Obama might attend the Poznan meeting, which is due to work on details of a new climate treaty.

A new pact to succeed the existing Kyoto Protocol is meant to be in place by the end of 2009. De Boer said that the U.S. delegation in Poznan would liaise closely with Obama’s team.

——————

We believe that there will be an Obama observer at Poznan, but he will have a clear mandate to keep away from the negotiations. Obama does not want to become a co-owner of a sinking ship. He will in due time take the reins in his hands and wants to have free hands to do so. No last minute bail-out please! A bailout that leaves him holding an empty bag? No thanks.

If Yvo de Boer is afraid to recognize the above, and still wants to convey that he is playing in tune with Obama - this is another case of UN misleading the innocents. The Poznan party is on - the decision making process is off!

Reader rejoice: there’s a small but amazing news-item regarding our
climate-change dilemma buried in the following report.  - JL

Why it’s best that people lose their jobs in this unsustainable economy.
by Jan Lundberg
Culture Change Letter #214
 http://culturechange.org/cms/index.php?o…

People need to lose their jobs. It sounds crazy, but what if it’s true?

In this time of mounting tensions and rude awakenings, it is fortunate we
can stress compassion and positive ideas. Yet, foremost we must be warned
about our present course as an unsustainable society. Sudden, disruptive
change is generally good to avoid, but sometimes we need to make an abrupt
and wrenching move to save ourselves.

Not being able to eat money is perhaps the best reason to prepare for the
future hardening of economic and ecological reality. Whether we call our
fate petrocollapse or financial collapse, we are about to find out that a
closer relationship to our land and our neighbors is all that matters.
Looking at what a typical job today really does for us or our community –
besides generating cash for others to profit off of — helps open the mind
to an alternative way of living without spinning our wheels.

If we cannot head off the worst of a crisis with intelligent action, at
least we can anticipate changes openly among ourselves. In so doing we
counter the prevailing stupidity which is where the big money is. Bailing
out the automobile industry is the next waste of money on a colossal
scale. Recessions and depressions are just part of the economy’s
old-school “business cycle” as well as common sense: what goes up must
come down. It is prudent to say it is better to deal with reality sooner
rather than put it off.

In today’s world, what really has to change is our lifestyle. But as long
as people can cling to a paycheck (or stock dividend), change is retarded
and the lethal system of waste and exploitation lumbers on until it takes
us down over the cliff. A slightly milder way of introducing the need to
give up suicide and ecocide is to suggest exploring, “Why losing your job
can be a good thing today.” If we consider essential needs being met, most
jobs are seldom directly applicable anymore to community resiliency. So,
whether it is through employment or unemployment, we need to resurrect
techniques of self-sufficiency.

Here are additional reasons we need to lose jobs that prop up the
climate-changing industrial system (the first three are like saying
“Location, location, location” when one comes up with the three most
important factors for lucrative property values):

Culture Change has covered these points at length and for years. Here is
all the reason we need for the first three bullet-points:

(Bonn, 17 November 2008) - Two weeks ahead of the UN Climate Change
Conference in Poznan, Poland, the UN Climate Change Secretariat in
Bonn has reported that greenhouse gas emissions in industrialized
countries continue to rise. [UNFCCC Press Release]

On the same island as the UN headquarters is a player that’s like a wolf
in sheep’s clothing. We are reminded of corporate news media’s real
allegiances when we see an outrageous column in the New York Times on
trying to preserve inappropriate, doomed car manufacturing jobs. Published
Saturday, the column “‘Drop Dead’ Is Not an Option” tries to justify
corporate socialism by saying auto manufacturer bailouts are just as right
to do as it was to rescue insolvent New York City in 1975. To make the
argument sound progressive and liberal, the “free market” ideology was
attacked by the columnist. I for one was not fooled, and jumped on it with
my letter below:

 A key in the fight to do good for the US economy and for the global environment, including the preoccupation with global warming/climate change, is the needed replacement of Michigan’s Ambassador to Congress - Congressman John Dingell from his entrenched position as Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Henry Waxman of California, a Pelosi ally, wants that position, and this change could not come at a better time - this because finally one must start doing something about the fossil US automotive industry. Tell the industry - no bailout unless there is a clear real guarantee that the vehicles will be more fuel efficient - plug-in electric etc.

Dingell’s opposition to clean-air controls is a decades old staple of US Congress. His wife is an automotive industry executive, in between them they had the automotive industry to fight for, and the clean air laws to fight against.

Dingell was successful in delaying control of acid rain pollution, and keep in place smog and soot - this during much of Clinton’s Administration. We just do not think that he is good for the incoming Obama Administration.

It was Waxman who fought Dingell for years, and it was Waxman who helped Bill Clinton in getting enough votes in the House to sustain some of the positive aspects of the Nixon Clean Air Act that Dingell wanted to weaken.

Had Dingell succeeded, we likely would not have seen the numerous pollution control programs adopted in the past decade to help meet those standards, including tougher smog-season controls on power plants, tougher standards for cars and SUVs, cleaner gasoline and diesel fuel, and better standards for highway trucks, off-road diesel vehicles, trains and boats and small engines, to cite just a few. But all of these past achievements are just the beginning of what is needed today. Just think of the much higher miles/gallon fuel efficiency standards that will have to be built in into any help program to Detroit. This simply will not happen under a  Dingell management of these upcoming Bills in US Congress. Dingell is just the wrong Democrat for this job - and it is no secret why he managed to hold onto it for so long.

Next week, US Congress will put up the Waxman - Dingell fight to a secret-ballot vote in Congress. We hope Waxman winns.