(The following editorial appeared on the Patriot News website on August 8.)
HARRISBURG, Pa. — Too many Americans are inclined to believe that there’s something shady going on with the price of oil. and somewhere, somehow, there is a simple and easy means of repealing recent substantial increases in energy costs.
And they expect the government — if not President Bush or Congress, then the next president — to push that button and get us back to the “good old days” when no one worried about the cost of a fill-up.
But the Age of Cheap Oil is over. That’s barring a full-blown global recession or depression, which is not our idea of a solution to higher energy prices. We aren’t defenseless, however. July was the seventh straight month that motorists drove less than the year before. That reduction in demand has had a huge impact on prices at the pump. And it has materialized a lot sooner than anything Washington might have conjured up.
We are by no means out of the woods. We’ve been down this road before, though in some important respects this is different. Because the United States is the world’s largest consumer of petroleum, its rate of consumption is a major factor in setting the price of oil in a global market. But it is only one factor.
Nevertheless, every step we take to conserve and use energy of all types more efficiently adds to the positive side of the equation.
And the truth is that there is not one “big thing” that can be done to make the problem go away. Rather, the challenge requires a host of seemingly small steps that together can have a big impact.
A reader recently reminded us of a December 2006 Patriot-News editorial that focused on one of those steps with local implications. That’s the proposal to upgrade Norfolk Southern’s “Crescent Corridor,” which parallels Interstate 81 for much of the way, in order to put more trucks on rails.
Consider that one intermodal train can take upward of 300 trucks off the road. Based on 2006 traffic statistics, the railroad says that 1 million trucks could be taken off the highway in a year. This would equate to a 26-million-gallon savings in fuel.
This idea has been around for some time, and indeed, Cumberland County Commissioner Rick Rovegno has commendably worked hard to generate interstate support for this plan. For its part, Norfolk Southern is making various improvements where it can, including looking to build a new intermodal rail yard between Harrisburg and Hagerstown, likely closer to the latter, according to spokesman Rudy Husband.
But to do the job right, to maximize the use of rail to divert truck traffic from roads and save energy requires a public-private partnership, notwithstanding that Norfolk Southern reported record earnings for the second quarter last month.
As with too many other issues before our state and federal governments, there exists a striking dearth of decision-making, of commitments, of getting the job done. And so, for now, another good idea for saving energy, as well as for reducing congestion and pollution, languishes for lack of strong leadership at the highest levels of government.