High-Speed Rail In California

is dead.

And what’s hilariously ironic is that it was green on green:

After encountering criticism from environmental groups, Gov. Jerry Brown signaled Wednesday that he plans to withdraw his controversial proposal to protect the California bullet train project from injunctions sought by environmental lawsuits.

The Left’s project is foundering on its own inherent internal contradictions.

37 thoughts on “High-Speed Rail In California”

      1. Um, Rand, I think you need to read the comments here more carefully.

        On your earlier thread about “Undoing Obama’s Legacy”, I commented that Hot Air had a link to the story about California HSR “coming off the rails” in the context of yet offering yet another example of Mr. Obama’s legacy getting undone or rolled back before he even stands for reelection.

        Do I even get at “hat tip” for “reader Paul Milenkovic brought to my attention a link to a story of California HSR on the path to fail on account of environmental delays.”

      2. From my earlier post:

        “. . . there is a link over at Hot Air . . . that proclaims that HSR in California is now dead. The deal is that Governor Brown caved to the environmental lobby and backed off his bill in the Legislature to exempt the CA HSR from strict environmental scrutiny.

        . . . and none of this will get straightened out before the December 2012 deadline the US DOT put on getting those at-the-ready shovels going with the 2.5 billion in Federal stimulus money for the CA HSR.

        The site also gloats about the green-on-green fratricide, that an enviro project (electric high-speed trains) is getting blocked by green lawsuits.”

        The other thing, Rand, with regard to “The Left’s project is foundering on its own inherent internal contradictions”, for whatever you think of Governer Edmund G. “Jerry” Brown, Jr., the man has been around for a long time and had been governor long before the “bullet head” look was in style.

        Maybe, just maybe, California is dead broke and Governor Brown knows all of this, and maybe the HSR is such an albatros that no one wants it anymore, and maybe, just remotely maybe, allowing it to run into the buzz saw of enviro opposition is a politically astute way to bail on the project.

        So there is no foundering from the former Oakland, CA mayor but simply a tactical move to make this all go away before it sinks his governorship.

        1. That would make sense.

          The HSR project won’t succeed because it’ll never get funded, and if it did get funded then the failure would be even more spectacular (but with the accountability delayed until the train could pull empty cars between two empty towns). Most Californians now oppose the idea, so there’s no point in actually backing it. He loses support from the majority of the public, loses support from environmentalists, and will likely lose support from HSR proponents who will blame his poor management for the project’s inherent failings.

          If he plays it right, by letting environmentalists kill it (with his blessing), he can both avoid the blame for killing it amongst the general public, appear as a defender of the environment to the people he let kill it, and keep the HSR proponents on board with promises of an even better HSR system yet to be laid out. He could go from lose-lose-lose to win-win-win.

        2. Paul,
          Gov Moonbeam can’t save his governorship unless he starts crappin’ gold ingots that uses to pay off California’s debt.

    1. As best I can figure, the “capitalism” Marx decried was a pathological market economy where those who had or could buy the right connections could have the rules altered in their favor. Where the rich and powerful could force people to buy their product at the price offered, or force them to work at the wage offered. Where a contract only applied if the right people liked it.

      A far cry from a healthy free market where fraud and force are treated as a disease to be cut out, and a properly made contract is binding.

      1. Indeed, Peter. “Capitalism” and “free enterprise” are not synonymous, and have been dishonestly equated by Marxists (and their useful idiots) ever since Marx invented the term “capitalism”

  1. This isn’t true. We all know that Republican’s hate for Obama, government, and our children are to blame for not being able to build great things like the Hoover Dam anymore. People really need to think of the children before calling opposition to this green on green. Just more election year politics to disenfranchise minorities and distract people from the important issues facing our nation like the need for greater regulations in boxing.

  2. Rule 1: Greens oppose any project that requires more than a hammer and shovel.
    Rule 2: Any green project big enough to have a significant economic or technological impact will require more than a hammer and a shovel, so see rule 1.

    Or you could note that they oppose all proposals ready for implementation, even their own.

    On an economic side, any project that will generate a profilt (unlike passenger rail or solar farms) is automatically suspect, as are its backers. The more green leaders lie about profitability to build public support for a project, the more likely they are to raise the suspicions of the green rank-and-file. The result is what we would call fratricide, but they would think of it as a purifying purge of captialist corporate agents masquerading as green advocates.

    1. In Seattle, we’ve had a toy monorail from the 1962 World’s Faire. It runs at a profit on $2.25 per trip.

      The urban renewal types decided we needed mass transit. They decided on light rail. FOIA ended up showing they’d basically ditched examining a monorail completely.

      The part that’s amusing is a quote from one of the chief light rail people:
      “They’d only be employing 1,000 people, -we’re- going to employ –5,000- to do the same thing!”

      Winnar.

      1. “they’d basically ditched examining a monorail completely.”

        Did anyone point out to them that Shelbyville has a monorail?

      2. I read an article a few decades back, when E-tickets still meant something, that there were two train systems in the country that made money–the Seattle and the Disneyland monorails.

        Somewhat seriously, what seems to be necessary for a profit is a lot of passengers and a few stops, and an acknowledgement that the mass transit system is not for the masses. Incentive to actually make a profit helps.

      3. They decided on light rail. FOIA ended up showing they’d basically ditched examining a monorail completely.

        I hope no one is suggesting that California should have built hundreds of miles of monorail. That would be doubling down on the bad decisions. At least with the current high speed rail proposal, there would be existing engines capable of handling the load. I doubt there’s a monorail on the planet capable of the combination of distance and load that was expected for the defunct system. That means you would have to roll your own at increased cost and maintenance.

        1. The key distinction is really just between asking the engineers “make us the most profit” versus “make us the most employees”.

          The one key difference comes in as an elevated track. With an elevated monorail, the -train- really doesn’t need to ever worry about pedestrians on the track. Because there’s a 3 foot gap between the (fenced) platform and the actual track. With a 20 foot drop in between.

          A -known- obstruction free track makes the driver a backup system. Or retires his job entirely.

          But yes, you can do exactly the same sorts of platform design for any other train type. But you have to -want- to and design with profit in mind.

          1. If you have to have an elevated system in an urban setting, then monorail at least has a chance. But most of this line would be ground level in rural areas, say on an earthen berm. You need to figure out how to avoid crossings, but it strikes me as a cheaper solution than a purely elevated system (either monorail or standard two rail) would be.

        2. I don’t think anyone is seriously proposing a high speed monorail for California. But the high speed rail has never been about practicality, and one-off, roll-your-own designs are nothing new to California (the San Francisco BART system for example).

    2. Mr. Turner, you’ve just theorized the existence of a Leftist micro-singularity — it should collapse upon itself!

  3. Now imagine how bad it could have been, if Obama legislation wasn’t to a large degree, self-destructing. This four years will be a disaster as is, but it could have been a lot worse.

    Voters really need to take more responsibility and not just vote for people because they talk nice, look pretty, or promise, excuse me, have positions for the right feelgood stuff.

  4. Here in Nevada, what’s even more ironic is that although there is a lot of talk about renewable energy (mainly geothermal and solar) as a possible growth industry, a friend of a friend works for the Fish and Wildlife Service, and part of her job involves working on environmental impact studies of sites proposed for solar and geothermal installations. I’ve heard her mention on several occasions how a proposed geothermal station, for instance, could pose a problem because the transmission lines might disrupt a colony of field mice (or some such creature).

    1. Forget about the mouse. The real environmental problem is good ol’ fashioned 2nd Law of Thermodynamics considerations of heat rejection into the environment.

      I told this story before, but there were these research engineers from Argonne Labs giving a talk at the U about engine cycles based on supercritical CO2 as a working fluid, with the main point being that the turbomachinery gets really small owing to the density and other properties of compressed CO2. For all of the arm flappage of “Higher Education Bubble” and “gut majors”, there is a lot of serious scholarly thinking that goes on at the U.

      The US Navy runs its subs and some of its surface ships on nuclear power, and a nuclear power plant is pretty much a steam engine, running a non-superheated saturated-steam Rankine cycle owing to the about 600 deg-F peak temperature limit imposed by the composition and cladding of the nuclear fuel. Yeah, yeah, pellet bed reactors, blah, blah, molton salt, and so on, but they were baselining what the Navy and other operators are using.

      I also got the sense that the US Navy wasn’t in a hurry to adopt new power plant types, but they were paying contract money to another Federal lab (Argonne) to “cover all the bases” — the military funds research to discover the Next New Thing or to prove that a Next New Thing isn’t possible and stop worrying about Russia or China having something we don’t have.

      At the end of the talk, my hand goes up, “Um, can you go back to your earlier slide, yes, that one right there. I see you have three heat exchangers in your cycle. In a steam powerplant, those three heat exchangers would be the boiler, the condenser, and the feedwater heater, right? The thing is with a steam plant, water has an anomolously high heat of phase change owing to the hydrogen bond that almost no other substance has, and even when there is no phase change, liquid water has a high heat capacity and is well suited to heat transfer. In switching to supercritical CO2, don’t you give up a lot of the beneficial properties of water in those three heat exchangers?”

      You could see our visitors lower their heads and start to look at the tops of their shoes, “Well yes, that is one of the things we are investigating. In trade for the more compact turbines and pumps, we lose out in the efficiency of the heat exchangers, and that is all part of our study. You are never going to get the full theoretical benefit of the CO2 cycle on account of this, and maybe this is why Rankine cycle has been around for so long.”

      So what does this have to do with geothermal and solar energy in the Nevada desert? You have to reject the heat at the “bottom” of the thermodynamic cycle, and even a solar PV panel is rejecting heat of the portion of solar photons not converted to excited electron-hole pairs. The PV panel has enough surface area that it is rejecting heat to the air, not much differently than the desert soil and scrub vegetation in the absence of the panel. Almost everything else, and especially solar-thermal and geo-thermal steam (Rankine) cycles need to reject heat, and this is most effectively done with cooling water, which is in short supply in the desert.

      But what about Stirling and closed-loop Brayton cycles using helium or (supercritical CO2) as a working fluid! You still need to reject heat — this may also be a consideration for concentrating solar PV as well. A gas turbine or Diesel avoids the need for cooling water as it rejects heat to the exhausted mix of air and combustion gases, but these cycles start with high temperatures at the top of the cycle and are rejecting heat at rather high bottom cycle temps. These alternative energy schemes (with the exception of solar PV that is effectively using a top cycle temperature of the radiation from the solar photosphere) are limited to top temps and need low bottom temps to get any kind of 2nd Law efficiency — they need cooling water and lots of it. In the desert.

      There is a reason that most power plants and especially nuclear plants are by a major river, lake, or the ocean. I am not saying that solar power in the Nevada desert is impossible or that the environmentalists are right about every objection. But large scale desert solar or geo-thermal power poses technical challenges, environmental challenges too.

  5. It is apparent that Chowchilla did not get the word that the train will never actually be built. This is only a mechanism for spending a ton of money on friends and such.

    This misunderstanding will shortly be straightened out I’m sure.

    1. That is the heart of the issue. If we want them to stop spending other peoples money… we’ve got to stop them from creating any taxpayer funded projects (What am I crazy? No. There are others means of funding.)

      But isn’t that there whole job? Yes (well, the spend half; then there’s the tax half.) What does that have to do with stopping it?

      What happened when we turned the lights on the Acorn cockroaches and stopped congress from spending on them? They changed their name and continued to get money… to this day. We can’t continue to let that happen. Defund them all, completely and totally. Tax dollars should never be political dollars… evah!

      Call me naive and I’ll call you stupid. Nevah! Evah! Yes, we’ve got a long way to go because we are at the other extreme at the moment. That doesn’t change the goal.

  6. Gah! Ah well I guess the US will keep using its crumbling railroad infrastructure. Business as usual. One thing that always amazes me when I visit the US is how utterly obsolete infrastructure is. From poor cellphone coverage at ludicrous speeds, to hotels where you pay for WiFi access, antique railroads that look like something from the past, or electrical systems and wiring that seem to be from the time Edison was still alive. Sometimes I wonder why the US is supposed to be the top economic power in the world. Are the GDP numbers being fudged or what? Once again apathy and inertia rule as projects to make any new infrastructure get stalled.

    Given the current prices for oil one would expect there would be a push to fund electric transport which can use power generated from all kinds of cheaper sources. But of course that will not be done since it makes way too much sense.

    1. US is supposed to have the top cargo rail in the world. I don’t know if that is true.

      What cheaper sources did you have in mind for power generation?

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