This is a guest post by Hans Noelder, a mechanical engineer and cofounder of the Madison Wisconsin Peak Oil Group. This is a link to Hans' blog, where this originally was posted.

Having recently traveled from my home near Madison, Wisconsin to Pontiac, Michigan using rail as much as possible (Metra commuter rail from Harvard, Illinois to Chicago and thence Amtrak to Pontiac) it is clear to me that investments in rail-based transportation could yield substantial environmental and social benefits in this region of the United States – primary among them a massive reduction in automobile-centric sprawl. The synergy between rail transit and dense, pedestrian-oriented urban habitat is especially clear in the Chicago heartland. Her leaders – God bless them! – never allowed their transit system to collapse, much less be systematically dismantled by transit-averse business interests.

However, I am troubled by the various claims I've seen over the years regarding energy consumption and CO2 emissions per passenger-mile for trains/streetcars versus automobiles versus airplanes.

Apropos of yesterday's gas tax report and discussion, today we bring you Alan Drake's ideas on post-peak mitigation. Alan is an engineer, former accountant, and professional researcher based in New Orleans with best hopes for many. Alan would also like to thank the lovely and talented Wendi Berman for her editing skills and assistance.

Many proponents for public spending on Post-Peak Oil mitigation are attracted to gasoline and diesel taxes or more generic oil and/or carbon taxes. In an era of rapidly increasing oil (and all other energy) prices, passing such taxes will be politically difficult and take precious time.

I would like to propose an alternative tax for Phase I of Peak Oil mitigation that adheres to Sen. Russell Long’s famous dictum “Don’t tax you, don’t tax me, let’s tax that fellow behind the tree!”

World Trade Organization (WTO) rules allow for a specific exemption that will allow the United States of America to impose a non-discriminatory tariff (it applies to all goods and taxable services, with a specific exemption for essential goods) if the funds raised are used to reduce our structural trade deficit, i.e. our oil consumption.

Specifically, the WTO allows nations with a structural balance of trade deficit (which the USA certainly has) to apply a non-discriminatory tariff if the funds from that tariff are used to reduce the structural trade deficit (which reducing oil use certainly would do). A separate section of the WTO treaty allows the importing nation to exempt “essential” goods.

In 2006, the USA imported $1.861 trillion in goods (and exported $1.023 trillion). This allows for significant revenues from a small percent tariff.

Staten Island's Old North Shore Rail Right of Way

[Update 9/20]: Last night at a community meeting with City Councilmember Michael McMahon (D-North Shore) a disgruntled citizen made this statement:

"The poor people of the North Shore, all they have is the bus, and if they don't have a bus, they're walking," he said. "It's inexcusable that all the politicians of Staten Island can't figure out how to open up the railroad."

In my continuing series on Restoring New York City's region rail network, today I will touch on NYC's forgotton borough, Staten Island. While Staten Island is the smallest borough in population, it has almost half a million people. It is also New York City's least dense and most automobile dependent borough by far. Part of this stems from geographic isolation, but also because the Island was not developed until after passenger automobiles became the norm in transportation. Indeed, it's major railway branch on the North Shore of Staten Island died long before the Verrazano Bridge was completed which brought a flood of development to the island.

However, the over-reliance on the automobile has created a traffic and transportation nightmare for Staten Islanders, who have one of the longest average commutes in the country - 44 minutes. So what's being done to address Staten Island's transit pain?