Louisville doesn’t need Donald Trump to teach us how to ignore climate change

The Metropolitan Transportation Plan adopted and funded by the transportation planners at KIPDA, state and local governments, charts a path for increasing carbon emissions from fossil fuel combustion vehicles past 2035. KIPDA’s planners have been compelled to ignore global scientific consensus that the transportation system needs to rapidly reduce carbon emissions.

“Since we are already at one degree of warming, "the math is simple," he says. "To limit warming to 2 degrees, CO2 emissions need to fall, on average, by 10 percent for every tenth of a degree of warming from now on. To limit warming to 1.5 degrees, CO2 emissions need to fall, on average, by 20 percent for every tenth of a degree of warming." With the world warming by a tenth of a degree in less than a decade, that is a big ask. (see article below)

Rather than falling 20% in the next 10 years, the transportation highway system we have built and will be paying for –with interest,

will rely on increasing automobile sales, increasing retail gasoline sales and will result in increasing carbon emissions. Louisville politicians who took political donations from the automobile infrastructure and in return gave them the automobile playground they asked for–sold out the future.

For more than 20 years the local advocacy group CART--Coalition for the Advancement of Regional Transportation– begged, pleaded and lobbied for investment in low emissions light rail network  to remove fossil fuel vehicles. But, our ‘sustainability leaders’ like Mayor Greg Fischer, have not even begun to explore how carbon could be reduced by powering an electric transit system of significant scale. Such a system now has funding problems caused by the two bridges billions of  dollars of toll repayment debt.

Metro citizens teeth should be chattering for more reasons than cold weather. With Trump and the Republican Congress aiming to get the tax man off the back of big corporations the money for infrastructure mega-projects will have to come from another pot. Where do you think that pot of money will be?  Try your wages and property tax bills. Local taxing zones, gas taxes and other mechanisms will be deployed to keep the flow of money going to banks, lawyers/ contractors/ engineers and then out the back door to the political cronies.

  What the scientists say is that the carbon emissions have to be lowered on a fast track--starting now. But like many American municipal governments, Metro Louisville is captured by the automobile and gasoline merchants. We can’t plan our way out of the most serious threat to human civilization ever faced, because our local leaders can’t stay in office if they try to talk about pragmatic measures to reduce burning gasoline and diesel. LaDonald and Rex Tillerson would find Louisville an ideal community and we are likely to see them soon.