TCI Regional Policy Design Stakeholder Submissions

I am from Northern Maine, you know, `the other Maine". We pay enough for our gas here. Enough with the price gouging! ITS bad enough that you have forgotten about us, NO NEW GAS HIKES!!!!!. Between the cost of living and health insurrance, don't you think we have gone threw enough??!!??

An increase of the gas tax should be voted by the people not forced on the people.

Dear Sir,
I am a concerned citizen. We need to have a national policy to greatly reduce transportation pollution. There are currently no major US manufacturers making all electric trucks. This needs to change, as truck exhaust in the cities are a major pollution concern. People need to be given incentives to use public transportation that is cleaner, reliable and more convenient. Our current state of affairs is unsustainable. The technology exists for this. We just need the national will to do it.

Sincerely,
George D. Carroll

I prefer to take public transport when possible, and climate change is my most pressing concern. I am fully in favor of planning and developing a low- or no-carbon transportation system to mitigate climate change and to make travel a reasonable moral choice.

Maine is a lower income state than the majority of states listed in this group. Families and retired folks are working hard to pay our bills as it is....we can't afford an electric car, gas is not taken for granted. We are very conservative in our use of gasoline and heating oil. We live a simple life and don't own any toys, no camp, no great expensive vacations. We love Maine especially the way it used to be. Please listen to your people of this state first and respect their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor. Yours Truly, JCarter

Global heating is literally an existential crisis. We need to be addressing it comprehensively and this is a vital piece of that effort.
Transportation and Climate Initiative (TCI) states are developing a regional policy for low-carbon transportation following the December 18, 2018, statement by nine states and Washington DC committing to:

“…design a regional low-carbon transportation policy proposal that would cap and reduce carbon emissions from the combustion of transportation fuels through a cap-and-invest program or other pricing mechanism… [and]… to complete the policy development process within one year, after which each jurisdiction will decide whether to adopt and implement the policy.”

Free public transport would be a vital piece of this that relies increasingly on electric vehicles, especially in urban areas like New York City.

Carbon cap/trade and all the proposals I've seen here cannot work without actual, less polluting forms of energy for transportation. So far. the only viable substitute fuel for transportation is natural gas. No other source, except nuclear power, has the ability to transport what needs to be transported economically. There are no "renewable" resources that are less polluting. They simply export or move the pollution around.

It would be a very good idea to remove the "carbon" appellation from the discussion. It hides the true nature of the problem which many perceive to be carbon dioxide emissions. The more research that is done the more it appears that carbon dioxide has more benefits than detriments. Each round of reports from the IPCC has reduced the amount of projected temperature increases and shown more off-setting benefits from somewhat higher temperatures and levels of carbon dioxide. It is, after all, the source of all our food.


Ethanol produces more actual pollution from production on the farm to delivery of ethanol to the transportation system than simply using fossil fuels directly.
Solar panels and windmills can only produce electricity sporadically, usually when it isn't needed and not when it is. Both would require collosal investments in huge batteries, concrete, rare metals and other highly polluting mining in third world countries, not to mention the removal and recovery of all the materials after they break/wear out. Recycling will probably cost nearly as much as the original production. Electric trucks would double down on the costs involved. The most potentially viable truck system would likely be dedicated electric truck driving lanes and overhead electricity, similar to electric trains. Powered by modern nuclear reactors this approach could reduce the amount of truck pollution greatly, but is only viable in dense urban areas. It took a century to get reliable electricity to rural America. An electric trucking system might only require 50 years.

Electric cars produce more dangerous pollution from raw materials production and simply move the pollution to poor countries. The cars themselves are only modestly more efficient overall than diesel or direct ignition Atkisson cycle gasoline engines. Electric cars require very significant subsidies to offset the negatives for anything but short work commutes(~20 miles) and all the daily accommodations needed for convenient use of the vehicle. To actually be functional the electricity has to come from hydropower or nuclear power. Solar and wind simply cannot supply enough power, even if every acre in the country had a windmill and a large solar array, with batteries.

So, rather than piling on loads of costs one everyone(including the people running this program) it would be much better policy to directly invest in speeding up the development and adoption of modern, 4th and 5th generation nuclear reactors. There are many design possibilities for nuclear reactors that are modular, scalable, safer, much more efficient, and much less liable to nuclear weapons proliferation than the current machines. Most are literally failsafe- if the reactor overheats it simply shuts down due to how they are designed.