Amtrak is unveiling a $117 billion, 30-year vision for high-speed rail on the East Coast that would drastically reduce travel times along the congested corridor.

Complexity is really only attractive to nerds. I say this as someone who loves complex systems and way they interact. Given the choice most folks would rather have a description boiled down to the barest of truths and then they go from there in thinking about it. This is part of the problem with the public perception of American Recovery Act, more commonly known as the stimulus bill.

It is widely held by economists and those who don’t rely on Faux News and Rush Limbaugh for their information that the stimulus worked very well, for its size. Even as it was being passed 19 months ago many were saying it was too small in its scope to completely fix the hole in the economy that the policies of radical Republicans had caused. This was a win/win situation for the Republicans as they would be able to reap the benefits in their districts and states, but still be able to say that it was bad policy since it did not bring the nation back to full recovery.

South Africa’s new high-speed rail line, the Gautrain, is not for the country’s poor.

In the coming months, there will be a series of articles on the Seminal called “Driven to Destruction.” It will unearth some of the sordid history of how the country became so car-dependent, how this dependency has become harmful in so many ways, and how we can begin to move forward to a more sane and sustainable system of transportation.

There are a multitude of reasons NOT to award the Chinese a contract for our new high speed rail. And yes, jingo-istic industrial support is one of them.

By Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium Blogger

In his first State of the Union address, President Barack Obama touched on climate issues only briefly. He called on the Senate to pass a climate bill, but did not give Congress a deadline or promise to veto weak legislation. Nor did he mention the Copenhagen climate conference, where international negotiators struggled to produce an agreement on limiting global carbon emissions.