Continued dependence on highways will result in millions--maybe billions of people dying.
I have not followed the highway toll issue very closely, except to see that numerous DUers are dismayed at the effects it may have on lower income people. I take those effects seriously as well. But I cannot emphasize enough how deeply our entire economic and social system has to change for us to even hope to avoid absolute global catastrophe. Our dependence on the car is a major factor in the ravaging of our climate. I don't know whether interstate highway tolls are intended to address that reality--even if so, I certainly don't think they are a fully adequate answer--but I am desperately hoping that they will have an effect if implemented.
Much of the world is already experiencing unthinkable hunger, conflict, suffering and displacement related to climate change. We will face it here too. We are already seeing the effects of this in billion dollar weather disasters, in massive crop failures and the mass slaughter of livestock which has finally trickled down to exploding meat prices this year, in wars and revolutions all across the world that over and over again can be traced to energy that is increasingly expensive, and farm land that is increasingly scarce as weather patterns change.
Furthermore, whether it's popular or correct to talk about peak oil, the fact is that there is more and more competition for nonrenewable fossil fuel energy, and that increasingly destructive and dirty forms of that energy are being drawn upon to meet the demand. This will put even more pressure on the climate, as well as on our budgets as the prices inevitably rise.
By and large, a fossil fuel driven car culture has no way forward; it must be abandoned as close to immediately as possible. My interpretation of the given evidence is that we must be forced to do this. If there is a relatively painless way to encourage that cultural transformation, I simply cannot oppose it, despite the genuinely trying consequences I know it will have for me and for many others.
As a person who has lived without running water and shared rice with her dogs, I know poverty. I acknowledge that paying to use the interstate is a very difficult prospect for a lot of people. But imagine how much more difficult it is to live through your ancestral lands being carved up, your ancestral rivers buried and the fish that have sustained your people for thousands of years rendered poisonous so that the world can run on tar sands. Imagine how much more difficult it would be if the form of agriculture that has worked for centuries in your marginal climate can no longer support you because what was once arid but workable land is now fully desert. Imagine how much more difficult to flee the island which has been home to you and your ancestors as far back as anyone can remember, as it sinks inevitably beneath the rising waters. The U.S. has the highest *per capita* emissions anywhere in the world. We are creating this problem, and our failure to effectively address it so far is a grave crime to the rest of the world.
I regret I won't be able to participate as much as I would like to in this thread, because I only have Internet for limited times of day. Thanks for reading, though.
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