Solutionary Rail's approach to decarbonization, opportunities, obstacles, and pathways forward
RSVP TODAY USING THE FORM BELOW
Friday, April 30th
3pm Eastern / Noon Pacific
A 3 minute intro video to the Solutionary Rail project is HERE, along with links to supplemental briefs and a free PDF of the book.
As you know, the largest GHG emitters are the transportation and energy sectors. The most difficult challenge for decarbonizing land-based transport is long haul freight. The most difficult challenge to decarbonizing energy is efficient transmission. For the last 8 years,the Solutionary Rail team has been exploring the role of rail transport and rail rights-of-way in the US. We've found that multiple public goods are served by putting rail at the gravitational center of addressing intersecting environmental, economic and social crises.
Solutionary Rail connects the dots on these challenges and can connect you with community and technical experts, offer you fresh ideas for addressing these challenges, alert you to potential obstacles and obfuscation from special interests, and provide short term policy opportunities that set the pace for long term progress.
Join us for a virtual briefing on Friday, April 30th, by RSVP'ing below.
Resources from Solutionary Rail:
- Our newest slidedeck provides a self-guided tour through Solutionary Rail.
- Our 2 pager on Rail in a Time of Pandemic may also have useful framing for your Congress members' work.
- This 2-page piece on assessing public interest served by balancing methods of freight decarbonization may be useful in your deliberations and provide criteria for assessing pathways to decarbonization that leverage efficiencies to minimize public harms, avoid unintended social justice, foreign policy, and climate harms.
- This pre-BETA True Cost Calculator is a prototype to urge USDOT, the Administration and Congressional leaders to connect the dots on US data to characterize the public interest impacts of our current system and harmonize infrastructure solutions with public goods.
Note on Terminology:
One note of concern re terminology, when speaking in terms of "high speed rail" is that everybody seems to mean something different - use it differently situation to situation. Perhaps we can all find a way forward in which the terms are less prone to misapplication. Rapid freight and passenger rail may be one way around this. HSR could mean anything over 79mph, OR we could use "higher speed rail" for 80-124mph, with 125-155 as conventional HSR. We use "conventional" in that it can travel on shared corridors, if not shared tracks. SR has experienced the "Ultra" HSR proponents as mostly pushing projects of/for/by tech and developer billionaires, or engineering firms like WSP that want public money without regard for public interests. SR has put out a few pieces related to this: This RailBite in our RailBites Series - and the False Solutions document it is based upon.
We look forward to discussing these issues and others related to transportation and decarbonization on Friday, April 30th. Please RSVP below and you will be emailed a zoom link for connecting.
If you have any questions beforehand, please contact our team at [email protected].
WHEN
April 30, 2021 at 12:00pm - 2pm
WHERE
Zoom
CONTACT
Bill Moyer
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