Walkalbe communities can reduce ghg by 60%

There is clearly a benefit to high gas prices beyond reduced deaths, pollution, and improved national security from less drivng. Communities like Martinez and Benicia benefit when refiners go out of business. The economic rationalism that reigned over our political, economic and business worlds has ignored the public health while subsidizing a toxic world. The risks were always clear, as defined by rational science, while a logical analysis of the economics showed acting early was cheaper than acting late. For example a UC Davis study showed that living within 500 feet of a major roadway resulted in permanent lung damage for children. Yet a strange kind of religious and ideological zealotry holds federal policy in its grasp ignoring public health at the expense of declined national security.

Ethanol's problem stems from starving people to feed our cars. Instead the Federal government should push for walkable communities on the transit corridors. Growing Cooler from the Urban Land Institute shows that walkable communities on the transit corridor can lower green house gases by 40% and Robert Cervelo at UC Berkeley says that if Transit can capture the landuse value created by its presence and that if done right, like in Hong Kong, transit can be operated on a profit with conventional economic models. The green house gas reduction could reach as high as 60 percent, Cervero added, compared to the level of per-capita emissions that would result from continuing business-as-usual sprawl-inducing policies.