Ask Your Lawmaker

Answer from: U.S. Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD)

Oh absolutely, I think that in the future there will be more and more use of rail- not just for personal transportation, but for carrying cargo. You carry cargo five times more efficiently on rail than you do by truck and by the way, you carry it five times more efficiently by water than you do by rail. So trucks should be moving cargo only the last mile. And we really need a national infrastructure system for moving people. The world has now reached its maximum ability to produce oil. Oil in the future- unless there’s a world wide recession which destroys demand- oil will be less and less available at higher and higher cost. And unfortunately we’ve torn down a lot of our light rail system. We ought to be building more of it. Why is the Congress not doing it? We truly have a representative government- our Congress is kind of naïve and innocent on the energy situation as the average citizen is. And this isn’t the highest priority for most of our Congressmen they just aren’t focusing on it. Uh, in their life fossil fuel energy has always been here. There’s the assumption that it will always be here. Of course it will not be. It is finite. It’s a finite resource. One day it will run out and we need to be preparing for that. It’s not going to run out for about 150 years, by the way. But for the next 150 years, it will be less and less of it, ever harder to get and ever higher in cost.

Answered on Apr 16th, 2008