We think of extreme climatic events as happening only in this past few decades, but there were events that fundamentally altered our country’s demography in the 1920’s and 1930’s and 1950’s, and were more devastating than what we are now experiencing.

The Mississippi River flooded in 1927 and had short and long term impacts.  In those floods, 700,000 people lost their homes and Herbert Hoover became a hero for his leadership in flood relief efforts, which propelled him into the Presidency in 1928. The flooding disaster triggered acceleration in the migration by African Americans from the Southern delta farm areas to Northern cities, which was part of a major migration by African Americans from South to North between 1915 and 1970.  It also resulted in a significant increase in federal control of waterways and flood control systems across the country.

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Recently, I stumbled on an online article about the Google effort to lobby the State of Nevada to allow self-driving automobiles to be used within the state.  That article is available at the following link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/11/science/11drive.html?_r=1

A more recent and broader article about self-driving cars was posted on Friday, March 31, 2012.

http://news.yahoo.com/coming-soon-self-driving-cars-120300164.html

If self-driving cars were to be broadly available, they would profoundly affect how society functions today.  There are many obvious consequences from having the ability to acquire and use a self-driving car:

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President Obama has proposed billions of dollars for rebuilding America’s transportation infrastructure.  Many others, including the America 2050 project, have very thoughtful plans for more intelligent transportation networks that will enable America to be globally competitive.  As a person who has been a strong advocate for transforming our transportation infrastructure, I could not agree more with the goals of better use of our transportation infrastructure and more public transportation in place of single-occupant vehicles.  The one place in which I might take a different view from those who advocate building new transportation systems is that I believe we need to repair, maintain and getter better yield from what we have.

However, I also believe that we could reduce the stress on our transportation systems with three non-transportation initiatives, all of which are far less expensive to implement than building a lot of new transportation infrastructure.

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In the September 23 issue of the Financial Times, reporters Chris Bryant, Fiona Harvey, and Tony Barber, in an article entitled “Climate Change Fears After German Opt-Out”, reported that the German government had backed a decision to exempt virtually all of German industry from new EU rules that would force companies to pay for carbon dioxide emissions.  Not surprisingly, the Merkel government justified the decision on the basis that it would cost too many jobs.

Over the last decade, the United States has been soundly criticized by governments, as well as environmentalists, for refusing to endorse the Kyoto Protocol to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.  Global warming has been seen as such an imminent crisis of such horrible consequence that governments have implicitly assumed that addressing it had priority over all other public policy concerns.  Obviously, short-term job losses now trump global warming as a higher public policy priority in Germany.  The reporters state that opponents of the German government decision believe that it will trigger off similar decisions by other governments. (more…)