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Bread and Circuses /
npub1ejy…h8ya
2024-03-04 14:00:27

Bread and Circuses on Nostr: Democrats are better than Republicans for the climate, right? Yes, of course. ...

Democrats are better than Republicans for the climate, right?

Yes, of course. Obviously.

Democrats are good for the climate, right?

Nope, that's not true. Although Democrats are better than Republicans on climate issues, they are still taking us in the wrong direction, eager to support Business As Usual.

HEADLINE: "US spends billions on roads rather than public transport in climate time bomb"
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Roads, roads and more roads. The US is continuing to spend billions of dollars on expanding enormous highways rather than fund public transport, with a landmark infrastructure bill lauded by Joe Biden only further accelerating the dominance of cars at the expense, critics say, of communities and the climate.

Since the passage of the enormous $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure law in 2021, hailed by Biden as a generational effort to upgrade the US’s crumbling bridges, roads, ports and public transit, money has overwhelmingly poured into the maintenance and widening of roads rather than improving the threadbare network of bus, rail, and cycling options available to Americans, a new analysis has found.

This spending is a “climate time bomb”, according to the new Transportation for America analysis, which calculates that more than 178 million tons of greenhouse gases will be emitted due to planned highway expansions by 2040.

“Nothing is fundamentally changing in terms of modes of transport," said Corrigan Salerno, policy associate at Transportation for America. "This much money going into highway expansion is, for one, a liability into the future, and two, it just doesn’t work. We’ve been expanding highways for decades on decades, and everyone consistently finds themselves stuck in traffic.”

The result is that the US will generate more emissions from transport — already its largest source of planet-heating gases — as a result of the infrastructure bill than if it hadn’t passed, according to Salerno. “You have to essentially walk down this giant cliff of emissions that we’re creating into the future because once these highways are built, there’s not really an easy way back from that,” he said.
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FULL STORY -- https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/feb/29/biden-spending-highways-public-transport-climate-crisis

#Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #Capitalism #BusinessAsUsual

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