With increased mass transit you can lower the average number of vehicles per household, number of personal miles driven every day, and the general cost of road infrastructure. (Less wear and tear, less traffic, less maintenance need.)

And, such products can be manufactured in the US. Creating jobs, technology, high-speed freight rail corridors can be created to move products between transit hubs quickly and efficiently with less smog overall... (Fewer trucks, less oil use, etc...)

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As for getting cars off the road, they should actually find a way to people to use carpool lane efficiently and effectively. In fact, I am totally against hybrid carpool lane exemptions. It doesn't do any good. One more hybrid car on the road isn't clean as one less car on the road.

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Seattle's bus system is pretty good, and we have light rail coming, which will soon be expanded. But it still takes me more than twice as long to get to/from work by bus as it does driving. Even with congestion. The funny thing is, my office is near a park and ride, but to get there I have to ride downtown, switch busses, and ride out of town, cross commute. So even the express lanes aren't in my favor ever.

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What happened to America being the land of the free? Once you start talking about tax hikes to induce cosumer decisions, we start moving from the great capitalist society that America is to communists. The thing about oil is that it is a very inelastic good. There aren't many close substitutes available now, and many people depend on it to get to where they are going, and they have to buy gas regardless of the price. Raising the price of oil to summer of 2008 standards, which is a dollar more on average than it is now, will not cause people to switch to hybrids (which may not be as environmentally friendly due to their batteries), but rather just burden the American people. How about lowering the tax on oil so that we have more money to spend on comsumer goods to get us out of this recession, eh?

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Actually, you could use biodiesel for the trains. Which isn't inelastic.

I'm not talking about a switch to hybrids. Unless a bike, mass transit, or walking is a switch to a hybrid. As for lowering the tax on oil, most of the tax money from oil goes to support infrastructure projects. You know, roads, bridges, things that are suffering badly in this country. (See Minnesota bridge collapse for a good example of this...) What happened since peak oil prices was that mass transit ridership number skyrocketed.

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I am interested in this cloud-seeding thing though. Cloud creation does offer some interesting promise of deflecting suns rays, and it doesn't cost much, is pretty much off-the-shelf technology and seems like we could do it pretty quickly. Interesting stuff.

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you couldn't even begin to fathom the global ramifications a plan like this might have.

Why do I feel like this was a line from a Bond movie?

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and perhaps, use your schooling time to learn how to spell.

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