In this episode, I talk with Bill Moyer, founder of the Reconnect America campaign, about the huge, untapped potential of U.S. railroads to support the clean energy transition. Bill makes the case that our privately owned rail system, focused on short-term profits, is missing out on big public benefits—like shifting freight from roads to rails, reducing emissions, and even using rail corridors to carry high-voltage transmission lines for renewable energy.
(PDF transcript)
(Active transcript)
Text transcript:
David Roberts
Hello everyone, this is Volts for November 6, 2024, "How Railroads Could Boost the US Energy Transition." I'm your host, David Roberts. Just like it has a vast network of interstate highways, the US has a vast network of railroad lines. Unlike the highway system, however, the rail system is privately owned and operated for profit. That, according to today's guest, is what prevents the rail system's vast potential for public benefit from being realized.
Rail is far more efficient and environmentally friendly than moving freight on trucks, so we could move a substantial percentage of freight to rail. Electrified rail lines are common in most other countries with rail systems, so we could electrify the network with familiar infrastructure and technologies.
And the system already claims right-of-ways through the heart of the country, exactly where we need more electricity to travel, so we could use those right-of-ways for long-distance high voltage transmission. Doing any of that, however, would require long-term planning, lots of patient capital, and supportive government policy, none of which are central concerns of firms devoted to maximizing quarterly profits.
This is the argument that activist Bill Moyer has been making for eight years now, ever since he and his colleagues wrote the 2016 book Solutionary Rail: A people-powered campaign to electrify America's railroads and open corridors to a clean energy future.
He hasn't had much luck persuading the railroad companies, but he has pushed the issue onto the agenda of lawmakers and partners in the climate and environmental justice movements. He's just launched his own newsletter and a podcast, Reconnect America, so it seems like an opportune time to catch up with him about what America's railroads are and what they could be. With no further ado, Bill Moyer. Welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.
Bill Moyer
Oh, thank you so much, David. It's such an honor to be here.
David Roberts
So much to get into here.
Bill Moyer
Right?
David Roberts
I say this at the beginning of every pod. I started researching this and discovered, "My God, I need 12 pods." What I think is the kind of the most important thing to understand, the thing that colors all the rest of this discussion, which is how the US rail system is owned and operated. This is strikingly different from how most other countries with rail systems own and operate their rail systems. So, just talk a little bit about how the US is different.
Bill Moyer
Yeah, we have this peculiar institution of private railroads. It's infrastructure that exists with the incentive, the fundamental incentive, and really the obligation to maximize profits for shareholders. This is particularly problematic for infrastructure that has, or ought to have, really other important purposes. And for 140 years, we regulated our railroad infrastructure to serve those purposes, I should say about 100 years of really strong regulations. I've been really interested lately in trying to understand why we got, how we got into this mess.
David Roberts
I mean, tell me if you think this is wrong, but to me, it seems absolutely just commensurate with the larger story of what I guess they call neoliberalism. Right. Just privatization of — I mean, it started about the same time and went along basically the same track as kind of what they call the "neoliberal revolution," I guess.
Bill Moyer
Well, I think that's absolutely true in regards to the explanation of deregulation. But what's intrigued me lately is, "Why on earth did we make the decision to not invest in this as a national project?" We did that in the 40s and 50s to build out the interstate highway system. Of course, post World War II and amidst a cold war. But I think that there are some really interesting threads that I really don't feel expert enough to delve into. But the genesis, the DNA of our railroad infrastructure is somewhat rooted in the same sort of resistance to national or centralized power that was key to prolonging the institution of slavery.
So, when I say peculiar, I'm actually kind of drawing around that same other peculiar institution of slavery. So, you know, it's a theme that I'd like to explore more as, you know, to understand why the postal roads didn't end up being a national project that translated into the railroads. But instead, there were state and private railroads and land grants for private corporations where the public was deeply involved, the military was involved, the corporations or the developers were given vast resources in order to build out, for instance, the transcontinental railroads.
David Roberts
So were the railroads privately owned from the beginning? Like this has been true in the US from the very beginning?
Bill Moyer
Yeah, that's right. Privately or state-owned. Yeah, it's a fascinating thing to know. Like, we don't have a national bank. Right. The post office was actually in the Constitution with the authority to build postal roads. There was such an emphasis in the expansion of this country on preserving slavery that I have a really hard time believing that there aren't direct links to the debates that must have happened in those times to build out this infrastructure in a way that was privately owned. It did not aid the sense of national or federal power.
David Roberts
The nervousness about federal power obviously plays a big role there. But one of the things I wanted to ask — we can't get too lost in the history, but — you know, sort of in the early 20th century, railroads were sort of legendarily corrupt. Like, it was a big deal. Like, one of the reasons, you know something, I'm much more familiar with the public utility system. The way we regulate public utilities is, in a sense, a response to the negative example of the railroads. I mean, we saw, like, you give a company a monopoly control over a railroad and then don't regulate it.
They're going to charge whatever they want, they're going to amass power, they're going to buy lawmakers. The whole thing is going to be a disaster. I mean, we had a whole public campaign in the early 20th century against monopolies. And yet, somehow through all that, they just kept right on owning the railroads. Like, it didn't result in any substantial reform of the railroad ownership. I don't totally get that.
Bill Moyer
Yeah, and I would actually reel it back a little bit earlier to the post-Civil War, the Granger movement, and the populist movement that was rebelling against the monopoly power of the railroads. I think that was very important at that time. The issue of the states created Granger laws to regulate railroads. But then that came into conflict with interstate commerce. And so that's why the very first agency was created, the Interstate Commerce Commission, in 1887. And with the Interstate Commerce Act, railroads became officially regulated very much like utilities. They were considered common carriers. With common carrier obligations, they were not allowed to curry favor and give politicians free rides and —
David Roberts
Right, let's just clarify here at the beginning because this is an important concept throughout. The common carrier obligation is just the obligation that you have to treat everyone who wants access to the resource fairly, basically.
Bill Moyer
That's right.
David Roberts
Same way, you know, the utility wires, the electricity system, like anybody who wants to generate and come online should be treated fairly. That used to be the case, but clearly, it is not what happened.
Bill Moyer
Yes, so non-discriminatory service, the business model of moving a lot of stuff a long distance being more profitable than moving a little bit of stuff a short distance, that didn't really change. The railroads always tended towards the former because there's maximum profit in that. And so, with the Interstate Commerce Commission, we created a transparent system of rates that were non-discriminatory. And that all sounds good. But then, as politicians will do, they start requiring service that is no longer profitable for this entity that has to make a profit. Sort of a kind of unfunded mandate, if you will, that then burdens the railroads to the place where it's harder and harder to make a profit.
And then you add on top of that the investment in public highways and publicly subsidized, paid-for freeways or the interstate system. And you have this increasing problem in the rise of the vehicles and the truck competition, right.
David Roberts
Publicly funded competition. Basically.
Bill Moyer
Basically, right. Because they're not paying for the infrastructure they're wearing and tearing. And this is what the railroads complain about. They complain about needing to level the playing field.
David Roberts
Right. So, it seems like we faced a decision point. There are two ways you could respond to that, which is we'll loosen regulation, we'll deregulate you, we'll allow you more freedom, or we'll just stop the pretense that infrastructure needs to make a profit. But we went in the former direction.
Bill Moyer
Right. And that's where your neoliberalism comes in, right?
David Roberts
Yeah.
Bill Moyer
And that's the direction we went when we could have taken the other path.
David Roberts
I was thinking about the model I think people have in their heads now, which I think is familiar at this point with like a publicly owned company which has the sort of statutory obligation to maximize quarterly profits, takes over something like, you know, Kmart. We've all seen this. They suck all the value out of Kmart. They don't do any of the big long-term investments that might help Kmart thrive in the long term. And so it's basically like a parasite that sucks all the blood out of Kmart until Kmart's dead. And then they go on and buy something else.
They've done it to Kodak. They did it — you know, like, you've seen this model happen over and over again in modern society. And what was sort of a light bulb moment for me reading about all this is like they're doing that same thing on a slightly slower motion way to the railroads. Now they've got the railroads, they've got to make quarterly profits. So, you don't make the long-term investments. Your capital is very impatient. You're just sucking existing value until it's a dead husk. And then you move on to something else. That is what is going on right now with U.S. railroads.
Bill Moyer
That's right, you named it. And our friend Maddock Thomas, who we feature in the first episode and other episodes, calls it "managed decline." Right.
David Roberts
Yeah.
Bill Moyer
Yeah, and another railroad analyst, Jim Blaze, an economist who's been working on a study through the University of Texas in Austin, referred to it as a very long-term going out of business sale. It's an extractive approach to infrastructure. Something that has been a public-private partnership from the very genesis. And so, they're able to mine resources out of it to get ridiculous profits. And as a deregulated industry, a deregulated infrastructure, the public is paying a very high price for that.
David Roberts
Yeah, this is sort of a unique situation. It's like they got a hold of Kmart, except instead of Kmart, it's a giant public infrastructure system. I don't think there's another case quite like this, and it's insane. And at no point did we make a collective decision to like, "Let's surrender this massive, already built infrastructure to the vulture capitalists and let them suck it dry." Like, I don't even think people know what's going on. I don't think people think about it or are really aware. Certainly never voted on it, you know, but, like, that's the background to this whole discussion.
Bill Moyer
Right, and then you have a railroad industry that would prefer that you not even pay attention to the fact that they actually even exist. Yeah, right. That's why we make that allusion to the Obi-Wan Kenobi quote, "These are not the droids you're looking for." Because I really think that every time I read a memo from the Association of American Railroads, especially like at the beginning of the Biden administration, it was very clearly like, "We got this. We know we're important for the climate. We got this. Whatever, hands off." You know, "Don't even think about touching us."
David Roberts
You know, don't worry your pretty little heads.
Bill Moyer
Right. "We got this." And it's kind of problematic because what is infrastructure for? And who is infrastructure actually supposed to serve if it's not the public? And so, to create this contradictory incentive that's in the very DNA of the system, with very few checks and balances at this point, is a recipe for disaster. Also, it's a huge lost opportunity.
David Roberts
Huge. And I bet if you asked the public, I bet if you took a poll, I bet 9 out of 10 people would tell you, "Oh, sure, we — like railroads are publicly owned." I bet people just assume that it's like the public highway system. Like, why would you do it this way?
Bill Moyer
Why would you?
David Roberts
It's not intuitive.
Bill Moyer
Right. Why would anybody do that? That doesn't make any sense whatsoever. And I think that that was a really important part for us when we were, you know, in our podcast, trying to describe this very interesting and very somewhat complicated system to just start with the basic fact that, "Hey, you know, you ride on a freeway, that is an open access system, it's owned by the public and maintained by the public because it serves important public purposes."
David Roberts
And, if I could just add one thing to that, every dollar that the public has invested in the interstate highway system has paid back in public benefits at a like two gazillion to one ratio. Like investments in long-term infrastructure, pay back richly, almost without exception.
Bill Moyer
Absolutely. And you know, I'm not sure when it is appropriate to bring this up, but I'll let you know that the external costs of relying on freeways for our freight transportation, in particular versus railroads, is immense.
David Roberts
Let's get into that now. So, there are three big buckets, three big things that you recommend we do with the rail system. I want to go through them one at a time. And the first one is, over time, freight movement has shifted en masse from rail to trucks on highways. And you do quite a bit of math on your site and in your book, showing that that is, from a public welfare standpoint, a disaster. There's much more pollution, much more costs. So, two questions: One is, why did that happen over time? Was it just that the interstates are publicly funded and so they just sort of like are cheaper to use?
Is that why it happened over time? And then two: Talk about some steps we could take if we wanted to start shifting freight back over to rail.
Bill Moyer
So, not a small assignment you just gave, just so you know.
David Roberts
I know this is like several chapters of your book. If you could just summarize them in 30 seconds.
Bill Moyer
And we've learned so much since the book and we're learning all the time. It's just one of these almost practically addictive subject matters. Yeah, ask my wife. So, first of all, of course, we were losing mode share to trucks because, yes, the roads were publicly maintained and paid for, et cetera. So the trucking industry could provide sort of the flexibility and didn't have the burden. And it could provide the responsiveness to shifting opportunities in ways that creating new infrastructure is hard to do. So there's certainly that. And then when we deregulated the railroads, we also allowed them to stop service to many places.
And the first thing we did is we forgave them of their common carrier obligation to move people. That was in 1970 and 1971. So, the creation of Amtrak was actually a bailout of the railroads, relieving them of an important common carrier obligation.
David Roberts
"Oh, we'll take over. The public will take over the passenger part and you can just keep the rest." Was that the deal?
Bill Moyer
That's right, because they were asking us to do that.
David Roberts
Is that because they were losing money on passengers? Like, is that because passengers are less profitable in some sense than freight? Like, why did they want that?
Bill Moyer
Yes, I assume that the passengers have higher demands than a lump of coal, you know. But yeah, I mean, we had two things going on at the same time of, you know, a renaissance in rail service in the 40s and 50s and simultaneously this, you know, crashing business model where the railroads were forced to continue to consolidate and go into these crazy business schemes that had nothing to do with railroads in order to cook the books. So they're consolidating, they're going bankrupt, et cetera. So then one of the fixes was to relieve them of this duty to provide passenger rail. And of course, as Meredith Richards, the president of the Rail Passenger Association says, "Get in your Chevrolet and see the USA" or whatever that marketing maxim was.
But so, there was this rise of the automobile — they created Amtrak, but they actually created Amtrak thinking it was designed to fail, that it was just like this, this last gasp.
David Roberts
Because the conventional wisdom was just that, like, people are going to want to move via cars and passenger rail is a thing of the past, basically.
Bill Moyer
I think so. I think so. You know, despite the fact that people went on their vacations, they went to all the national parks, had railroads that went, led to them. You know, people in rural places, people didn't just go from Chicago to Seattle or whatever. You know, they, they went from like Polson to Billings. Yeah, yeah.
David Roberts
This is another mind-blower, I think, for normal people who aren't familiar with the history there. We used to have rail lines not just to big cities, but to little towns all over the place. It was a very elaborate system.
Bill Moyer
Right. It's like, you know, you think some people, you know, you wonder, "Oh, you know, is rail somehow un-American?" Well, of course not. Rail actually made America. I mean, nothing could be more American than rail. And you talk to folks who go overseas and they almost always start with, "Wow, it was amazing to ride on trains. We love the trains."
David Roberts
All I do is sit around daydreaming about taking vacations on trains. Now, the idea that we're all going to move to cars just kills me.
Bill Moyer
Right. So there's that, and I just want to make sure I get back on, so to speak, tracks. So there's this decline of the market share and the mode share. But a key period of time is 1976 with the bankruptcy of Penn Central, the takeover of that freight railroad. And again, like Amtrak, it was given the mandate to turn a profit on something that wasn't actually turning a profit. So, like that was the killer for Amtrak as it was obliged then to cancel, maybe it's 3/4 of the trains in the US, so we lost all these different lines and all kinds of service with Amtrak.
David Roberts
Explicitly, they were canceled because they did not make a profit?
Bill Moyer
Yeah, because Amtrak was required to make a profit. And so, yeah, they were canceled for that purpose.
David Roberts
Exactly. And just put it out again. Why should public infrastructure make a profit? Why should this one kind of public infrastructure be asked to make a profit when roads aren't, et cetera, et cetera?
Bill Moyer
Right. And what's the cost to society when they are asked to make a profit or when we lose them? So then, with the deregulation of the Staggers Act, which — okay, so in 1976, railroads were relieved of the duty to move fruits and vegetables. And so that was because trucks were supposedly going to be able to do that better. So that's the first what we call an exemption or a commodity exemption where they didn't have to serve that commodity any longer. Well then, comes the Staggers Act and you go from a transparent rate system where the things are published and regulated to a contract rate system where things are oblique and privately negotiated and the railroads are no longer obliged to serve practically any commodity except for coal, crude oil, grains, and some hazardous chemicals.
David Roberts
So, everything else got exempted, basically like this common carrier obligation that is now almost entirely exemptions. Only four things are left unexempted.
Bill Moyer
Exactly. So, if you're a small town in Minnesota and you know your product is, let's say, cattle or fertilizer or something like that, they don't have to serve you anymore. And they not only don't have to serve you, they can set the terms of service for things and set the rates so that, you know, at one point you had to put 26 cars together. Well, that's pretty tough for a small industry. And then you have to put, oh, 52 cars in order to get the discounted rate. Oh, now it's 100 to 110 cars for that discounted rate.
So, the trains get longer and longer in order to get a kind of efficiency that works for Wall Street but doesn't necessarily work for Main Street.
David Roberts
So, basically, the railroads became, around that time, effectively a system for moving large commodities around and very little else.
Bill Moyer
Right.
David Roberts
And so, they remain, and coal remains a third of all freight.
Bill Moyer
Something like that. I think it was 30% or something. But it's — and it's in decline. And they were not only. They not only didn't have to provide service, they were allowed to spin off all of their less profitable branch lines. So people sometimes talk about short line railroads or Class II and Class III railroads, right? Well, we went from having 8,000 miles of Class II and III railroads or short lines in 1980 to having about 45,000 miles of short line railroads. And that happened because these less profitable branch lines, they didn't want to maintain them.
So, they spun them off to companies that didn't have to turn the same profit. Even those companies would embargo, meaning they wouldn't provide maintenance. So, you have all these trains traveling around at, you know, 10 miles an hour, because they're not maintained properly.
David Roberts
I was going to ask what happens to these lines that are sold to some little company that doesn't want to maintain them? Are they just sitting there rotting to this day? Like, are all these little lines still just there?
Bill Moyer
Well, a lot of them are. We also lost tens of thousands of track to actual abandonment, meaning they went through the process of getting the approval to abandon the lines completely. But the others, the ones that they spun off, those became the short line railroad system. But they're really — these monopolists are... God, I'm not sure what kind of language I can use on this show, but it's not very, I don't think very highly of them because even those spun-off branch lines, they are dependent upon the main line that connects them to the rest of the market or export, etc.
And as one person from a short line industry said to me once, maybe without thinking, "We know who brought us to the dance." Yeah, it sounds like I have a daughter. I don't think that's exactly the kind of ticket I want the relationship I want her to have with someone she's going to a dance with anyway. So they can't even stand up to them. If they argue that they need better service or better access, then those railroads can cut them off at the knees. Oh, and who picks up the bill for subsidizing the maintenance of those tracks?
Yeah, a lot of times it's the states. We do this — and I'm not saying we shouldn't, the state shouldn't own or maintain the short line system. I think we should actually, I think we should invest in it to be robust. But I think that the short line system should also have access to the main lines.
David Roberts
Right. Guaranteed access. State ownership doesn't get you much if you are, in the end, completely dependent on the whims of the companies that own the main lines.
Bill Moyer
Right.
David Roberts
It might as well be private anyway, so.
Bill Moyer
And we're subsidizing the profits of the branch lines of the Class I's. And you people will hear this word, the Class I. I think it's very important to tell people that that's just a designation in terms of revenue per year and that that designation has shifted over time and become more coarse. But we used to have hundreds of Class I railroads and we currently have six Class I railroads operating in the United States, four that are based in the United States. BNSF is the only one that is not publicly traded but is owned by Berkshire Hathaway, Union Pacific, Norfolk Southern, CSX, Canadian National and CPKC.
The Canadian Pacific Kansas City used to be the Kansas City Southern Route. So, those are the Class I railroads, and they're the ones that own the majority of the track, including the majority of the track that Amtrak travels on. It's only in the Northeast Corridor, where Amtrak owns its own track, that stretch from D.C. to Boston. Everywhere else in the country, or most everywhere else, it's operating on private host railroads.
David Roberts
Tell me a couple of practical things we could do to start moving freight back toward rail.
Well, we've got to incentivize mode shift and we've got to reduce the appetite of vulture capital for rail assets as an extractive resource. I was at the Surface Transportation Board hearing recently and testified at that, recommending that we revoke those exemptions that we gave the railroads in 1976 and 1980. We need to expand this idea of reciprocal switching, meaning that one rail operation can use another railroad's tracks if a customer is desiring service that is not being given to it. But that's the current rule, it only applies to non-exempted commodities. So that's the coal, the grain, and crude. So we really need to make it apply to all commodities.
Just bring back the common carrier obligation, bring it back for commodities generally.
Bill Moyer
Right. And then get as close as we can in the system that we have to an open access system by allowing the short line railroads to serve the customers and continue on to export if the Class I's refuse to do so. That, and honoring the preference that they are supposed to by statute give to passenger trains to guarantee at least an 88% on-time service. And us who live in the Pacific Northwest, the Amtrak Cascades is operating at about a 47 to 50% on-time service.
David Roberts
I'm painfully familiar.
Bill Moyer
Right. It doesn't really make you want to ride the train.
David Roberts
All right. And we'll get back to more, let's say, radical solutions later. But those seem like at least somewhat incremental, somewhat within reach. That would be legislative, that would be Congress?
Bill Moyer
That would be regulatory, I think. I mean, there might need to be some clarification or direction from Congress. There seems to be some doubts within the Surface Transportation Board of what it's exactly allowed to do, which is kind of strange.
David Roberts
Plus, the Supreme Court now won't allow agencies to do anything really. So, I'm guessing we probably would have to bring Congress in. So, let's move on to the second piece which I think will be of most interest here to Volts' readers, which is about electrifying rail. So, one of the key points you make, and this is a good segue from freight to electrification, which is if you're going to mode shift, you need to electrify for environmental justice reasons. So, just say briefly why that is the case.
Bill Moyer
Okay, well, there's approximately a trillion ton-miles of freight that's moving distances greater than 500 miles by truck. That's a large amount of impact. It's also very inefficient, energy-wise. And as we try to decarbonize the freight system, not just the trucks and the trains, but think of it as a freight system, the public has a large incentive to move that towards rail. Now, you can't double the impact of that if, in the communities that are already overburdened, there are cancer clusters.
David Roberts
By rail infrastructure.
Bill Moyer
Yeah, by rail infrastructure. Because one of the things we learned from our Moving Forward network partners, our environmental justice coalition we participate in, is about this idea of an indirect source. A factory is a source of pollution, but a rail yard or a warehouse or a port, it's a source of pollution because it attracts other sources of pollution, right? So it's concentrating that in communities and primarily communities of color and poor communities, and they actually have lower life expectancies, you know, by a couple of decades than other neighborhoods in the same locale.
So, places like San Bernardino, Kansas City, Chicago, those communities, those are environmental justice communities. There's no reason they should be taking on any more burden. And in fact, we should be relieving the burden that they're already experiencing. And that is the primary reason to electrify rail yards.
David Roberts
Right. So, if you're going to put a bunch more freight on the rail system, you have to at the same time reduce the sort of pollution involved in rail generally. That makes sense. So, I mean, one of the things I wanted to say by framing wise is, I think audiences today, if they hear "electrify rail," they think of it in the same way. They're thinking about electrifying cars and trucks, which is like some fancy new high-tech, futuristic thing. But electrified rail is not futuristic. No, it is something close to the default in other countries that have rail systems.
So, just talk a bit about the familiarity of electrified rail.
Bill Moyer
Yeah, electrified rail has been around since about as long as rail has been around. So, you know, in Washington state, we used to have, in 1928, we had like 750 miles or so of electrified rail in 1928.
David Roberts
And that was all catenary, that's all the wires above the rails that are attached to the trains?
Bill Moyer
Exactly. Because that's the most direct way to get electricity. The efficiency of a catenary line is far superior to a battery electric.
David Roberts
Well, I mean, I'm sure in 1920, whatever, batteries were even not even a viable option in 1928. But when we talk about electrifying today, obviously part of the background is that batteries have gotten much, much, much, much more powerful, much cheaper, much smaller. So, I think a lot of people think of, you're faced with a choice. Either you go catenary, which is building — people are familiar with these systems. A lot of trolleys and cities kind of run on these systems. They're just the wires that are overhead. And the vehicle's connected to the wire by a little stick, it looks like, and gets current from the wires.
The other way would be putting big batteries on trains or some sort of battery hybrid. Some sort of hybrid battery. But what you sort of recommend or talk about is what you call discontinuous electrification. So, explain how that works.
Bill Moyer
Yeah, and I think it's important to just say that the electricity that you get from a wire, you can get more faster. So, the energy intensity when you're climbing a hill or carrying a heavy load is really significant. And that would drain a battery quickly. Catenary is about 77% efficient over the whole, like the whole system. And battery electric, 64%. Hydrogen, which is being kind of sold to us as a, I think, a distraction, is at 25%.
David Roberts
Yeah, I mean, I guess we have to address this at some point, since a lot of people are thinking about and talking about it. But just like, much like in autos and trucks, hydrogen is just like the least efficient, most difficult to manage, most new infrastructure required, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. This is just. This is a dumb way to use hydrogen. Let's just put that on the record and move on.
Bill Moyer
Yeah, I think it's obfuscation. I think it's a distraction. It's a way to avoid doing the inevitable, which is a combination of catenary and with battery electric backup. It's true that it gets expensive to put catenary line under underpasses and across bridges and through tunnels. So the exaggerated costs of electrification in the US have been based on lifting overpasses, crowning tunnels, and rebuilding bridges. So, yes, the per mile cost, it can be exaggerated and inflated for other reasons. But the rest of the world, even Belgium, which is, you know, a pretty cool country, they probably have decent working conditions anyway, they can do it for less than $2 million per track mile.
David Roberts
How much of that is just "Everything is more expensive to build in the U.S."?
Bill Moyer
Oh, dude. You know, I mean, that's a whole other podcast on the, you know, the consultant industrial complex. You know, I don't even want to pretend to know about that. But the diesel, you know, diesel is about 40%. And remember, these trains, they're already diesel-electric. Right. It's a diesel generator generating electricity to run traction. The trucks, the wheel systems on the trains themselves, are actually electric.
David Roberts
Oh, so the diesel is just producing electricity on board, basically.
Bill Moyer
That's right. That's right. And you know, the batteries. This is also why I'd like to think about this as a freight system because how many batteries is it going to take to electrify all of those trucks? And what are the pipes that you're going to have to put in for the charging stations? And that's going to, you know, what's the public cost of that going to be when it's actually, you know, takes four times more energy to move it on a road than on a steel wheel on a track.
David Roberts
So electrifying rail relative to electrifying truck freight: easier?
Bill Moyer
Easier, and just more efficient and faster. Quicker to be done. I mean, one rail car can hold 100 tons, a typical truck and God only knows when a truck also has a battery on it, that's more like 20 to 30 tons, I think. So, there's a lot of reasons for both the mode shift. But then the electrification. We can avoid the most expensive aspects of catenary electrification if there's a battery backup for those sections of track.
David Roberts
So, you just drop the catenary wire. Like, if you get to an overpass, the catenary wire ends, you shift to battery power through the overpass and then reconnect to the catenary line, thereby avoiding having to string the line through the overpass. Is that the idea?
Bill Moyer
Yes. And then you use braking. Having a battery on board, or having — you know, at least a battery on board, if not a battery and catenary — allows you to use regenerative braking. So currently, braking energy is converted to heat and dissipated off. Right. So, it was I think 1915 when GE built the first locomotive that did regenerative braking.
Right. This is not a Prius. Toyota did not come up with this idea. This is what's crazy about this stuff; it's tried and true. This is not an experimental technology, and it is the norm around the world. Yes, advances in batteries are making it easier, cheaper, faster to do.
The question comes up again and again, I guess is like if these are profit-making corporations running these things and they could save money by electrifying, why don't they do it? I mean, I'm guessing it's just a short term versus long term payoff kind of thing, isn't it?
That's right. I mean, to you or me, a 7%, 8% return on capital. You know, say you're building that mother-in-law apartment or for your whatever, you know, 7 or 8% is pretty good, like you're going to, you know, you're going to pay it off within a decade. Well, that's not good enough for publicly traded corporations that are trying to continually lower what they call their operating ratio, the ratio of revenue to expenses. I mean, and these folks, they're shooting for 40 cents on the dollar average. So if, you know, a trucking company might make 5% for an individual trucker, or maybe a big corporation might make $0.12 on the dollar operating ratio, it's still profitable, right?
But if it's 10% profit on the dollar for a railroad to move stuff, they'd prefer it go by truck because otherwise their shareholders are going to come after them and say, where's that 40%?
David Roberts
Such a familiar story in the energy world. Lots of big upfront investments that would create low, steady returns over long periods that just aren't high enough return for the publicly traded corporations. And there's all this work and people beating their heads against walls and white papers trying to figure out how can we raise profits to the level that private corporations will finally invest. And of course, the other way to go is just like removing the insane idea that we have to produce 13, 14% returns on infrastructure investments. That doesn't make any sense. No infrastructure investment is going to give you that.
Unless you're just running a fire sale, right? Unless you're running a closing sale, as you say. So, do we have any? I mean, right now, the way things are currently set up, it would have to be these private corporations that did this, right? That paid for the catenary lines and the batteries, and so on.
Bill Moyer
Well, I was just hanging out with some folks who did the University of Texas Austin study on measuring the benefits and the cost of electrification. And I asked the question, "Is it in the interest of the railroads to own this infrastructure?" A guy I respect a lot, Jim Blaze, said, "No, actually." If it just becomes — like for the railroads, infrastructure is kind of a liability rather than an asset. It might be better for the railroad companies to have a long-term lease and let someone else build and own the infrastructure. So, I think from what I've heard from listening to your podcast, that this might be a difference between the electrical utilities and the railroads.
And so, the situation may be that through making the railroads less attractive to vulture capital and creating the need for other income streams such as leasing to infrastructure for electrification. And the third thing, of course, that we would want to talk about here, which is such a subject for you and your listeners, is transmission. So, in a place like the Southern Transcon from LA Long Beach through Kansas City to Chicago, passing over the top of Texas, we have a corridor, the Southern Transcon, that actually could potentially be co-locating high voltage DC transmission and reconnecting or connecting the three grids.
David Roberts
Before we move on to that though, really quick, a final question about electrification: Do we have any sense, has anybody done the math to get the sort of macro numbers to know A) sort of how much electricity it would require to run the whole railroad system on it and then B) sort of like how much the kind of emissions savings you would get? Do we even know that?
Bill Moyer
Yeah, I think it is a math problem. And my background, I have to admit, is I'm a drummer who did study political science and philosophy. So, I'll tell you every time I get into — dude, it's like I have been forced to know how to use an Excel spreadsheet. I mean, I transferred to Evergreen so I wouldn't have to take science. Right, right. So anyway, that's an inside joke for us Northwesterners, I guess. But I don't know if anyone's done the math to say how much electricity it would take to run the rail system. I don't think anybody imagines this actually happening like a turn of a switch, right.
David Roberts
Sure. And it's worth saying that, like the electrified rails in some other countries, especially hilly countries, the energy you get back with regenerative braking is pretty substantial. It almost sort of evens out the amount of power you're using in some places. So, that has to be taken into consideration.
Bill Moyer
Yeah, you're going to bring up this little caveat that is the tangent of our work in Southeast Washington where we're looking for alternatives to barging on the lower Snake River and looking at a route that we would like to restart between Pasco and the Palouse grain growing region. Now, that's a situation where battery electric locomotives might be actually exactly the thing because you have empty trains climbing 1600ft of elevation and then returning full, going down and using regenerative braking to recharge the battery. So, you could have a very large amount of recapture if not net positive.
So yes, I think it's very difficult to figure out. And then, what was the number your guest from FERC mentioned? The 2.5 or 2.6 terawatts, is that the right number for the renewable energy projects that are in queue?
David Roberts
Oh yeah, something like that. Something like that. Although not all of those are real, but something in that neighborhood.
Bill Moyer
Right. So, there's a lot of renewable energy. And I would say Sandy McDonald or Alexander McDonald, who did the NOAA study in 2016, same time we were doing the book, estimated at that time that we could get to 80% renewables by 2030. But the key element was the HVDC transmission. I'm not telling you anything but this issue of finding existing right of way.
David Roberts
Yes, well, let's go to that then, because this is in some ways the most intriguing aspect of all of this. Which is, I think, one of the most striking maps you have on your website is this sort of side-by-side map of, on one hand, a map of the existing rail system in the US, and then next to it, the map of where we would need high voltage transmission lines to get to, you know, our climate goals and to get to a fully efficient electricity system. And they are strikingly similar.
Bill Moyer
I think so. I think it's mind-boggling that we haven't already done this.
David Roberts
Which means we have the right-of-ways we need, where we need them, already.
Bill Moyer
Yeah. And so, what is taking us so long for figuring that out? I don't even understand why Berkshire Hathaway, that owns BNSF and Berkshire Hathaway Energy, hasn't done it itself. So, you know, this is our, you know, we have been pleading with Warren Buffett to do something like that. But it drives home the point that the public shouldn't have to wait this long to do such a common sense, take such a common sense step for decarbonizing not just our freight transportation network, but also our energy system.
David Roberts
Let's flesh out this idea of rail corridors. So, what does that mean? Like, do you envision just — I mean, is the idea that the right of ways on which the rail sits is wide enough to fit transmission towers?
Bill Moyer
Yeah. My understanding is that the right of way varies. Right. It can be in the West, it can be 200ft. In other places, it's more narrow. I've been looking at pictures of trains in the 50s and they have transmission above them. You know, you need some aspect of transmission already to do this. The Soo Line project and the — there's a couple of other projects.
David Roberts
Oh, I wrote one of my long and one of my favorite posts ever on Vox about the Soo Line. It's just such a cool idea, which is doing what you're recommending and burying the lines. So, the Soo Line is just a proposed buried high voltage transmission line going from like Chicago, from the wind in the Midwest, basically.
Bill Moyer
You also reported in this podcast early on about the HVDC and buried HVDC becoming more affordable. And this is something that's on a lot of people's minds, a multi-terminal HVDC in order to preserve, you know, the integrity of the system or the, you know, without taking a lot of that overhead space of the easement, being able to, you know, transmit. Yeah, you're going to have some HVAC. But it seems like this multi-terminal HVDC could be feeding the electrification of the railroads. It could be balancing the variability of renewable energy. So because as you said, the wind is actually always blowing and I would say the sun is actually always shining, it doesn't turn its light out at night.
You know, it's really just a matter of transmission, in my opinion. But again, you know, I went to Evergreen, so, you know, there's some very smart scientific people who went to Evergreen, but I studied music. Anyway, I think these are very important questions and these are opportunities because you know, it's that contiguous right of way. So if the railroads do not have an incentive to build out the electrification and they need new income streams, say that they continue to own that infrastructure, then the public has a variety of incentives in both electrifying and using the rail corridors for transmission and I would say most definitely mode shift of freight off of trucks and onto trains.
David Roberts
Yeah, these things are all, to use a word I hate, they're all quite synergistic. They all make sense together and could be part of a single sort of grand project. What do you think about some of the other ideas I've heard about rail lines, like building PV along rail lines? I've heard those proposals and then I've also heard, I believe there's a company actually trying to do this. Instead of building a transmission line along its rail, it just carries giant batteries, charges them in one place, carries them, and discharges them somewhere else. So it's like using the rail itself as the transmission.
Do you have any thoughts on those?
Bill Moyer
Yeah, you know, it's kind of like a hydrogen thing. You know, what is it? May many flowers bloom or something like that. But I think we have to get real about this. We have to create, we want to have in general a very efficient system and we want to invest in things that are the most beneficial. There might be grid-stabilizing opportunities in emergencies to rail in giant batteries for places. Absolutely. You know, that's actually how I met Natalie Popovich and some folks at Lawrence Berkeley Lab. We don't have to do an experimental thing.
David Roberts
It seems like a way around our inability to build the transmission lines.
Bill Moyer
Right. So, why waste public energy doing that thing, trying to work around something? That's the common sense solution. You know, it's very convoluted. Maybe it might be somewhat American to pay more to get less. But that said, I would like to shift that. You know, part of the reason we're doing this and call this Reconnect America is because we want to literally and figuratively reconnect America. There's something about the public helping or owning the electrification infrastructure or something other than the railroad owning it. I, of course, think it should be publicly owned, but it doesn't necessarily equate to mode shift.
But if the public is controlling the power flow or owns the infrastructure, part of the deal could be that the greater the utilization of that track system is, the lower the price of that energy comes. So that's just a new idea I've been bouncing around, trying to understand: how do you connect electrification with mode shift? Because it's not a guarantee. And I think that there's a public rationale for this. Our mutual friend, Rob Harmon, his brilliant show with you where he talked about stop talking about energy efficiency and start talking about efficient energy. I think that there's a parallel concept potential with railroads because of all of the public benefits of shifting and utilizing that infrastructure more.
So, I think that all those things are connected, but we're not going to get there with the system that we have.
David Roberts
Most of your work is focused on the existing built rail system, which, as we said, is quite extensive and elaborate. Is there any thought, or do you think a lot about building new rail lines?
Bill Moyer
Well, if hidden in your question is a question of what do I think about things like the ultra high speed rail project?
David Roberts
That was my second question. So, you can combine them if you want.
Bill Moyer
Okay. So, yeah, well, I don't think we need to build more rail except for in places that we took it out or returning rail that's been rail banked to actual service. We should make state rail plans and industrial siting incentivized to be adjacent to rail and use rail rather than trucks. So, to the extent that it's building out those little spurs and sidings and such. Sure. A friend of mine, Tim Gould with Sierra Club, he's in Climate Rail Alliance, he talks about going as fast as necessary, not as fast as possible. It's not a climate solution to try to go 250 miles per hour in a train that doesn't stop in all the places in between.
I actually think it's a math problem for Americans who are thinking. They're hearing that trains are going 200 kilometers per hour and they're forgetting to do the conversion because 200 kilometers per hour is 125 miles per hour. And that's a speed that is allowed. That's the beginning of high-speed rail. And that speed is allowed on conventional track in the current configuration.
David Roberts
So you're skeptical of building new high speed rail lines? New lines for high speed rail?
Bill Moyer
Except for where there are very dense populations, they're getting from one place to another and that is not Seattle to Portland. You know, we actually had a 20-year agreement between BNSF and Washington State Department of Transportation to have as many or more than 14 trips a day between Seattle and Portland, two and a half hour trips instead of three plus hours and 110 miles per hour on dedicated tracks. All of this was all in writing and it was supposed to be done by 2018. But this agreement was allowed to expire by an Inslee administration DOT that was obsessed about this ultra high speed project and it wouldn't build out the conventional higher speed project.
That would have actually been the foundation for a future where you put in these other railroads.
David Roberts
Yeah, I think this is actually something close to conventional wisdom among urbanists too. Which is like, new subway lines sound sexy, but if you just want value for your dollar, you just want better, more frequent service on existing infrastructure. Basically, like that's where you generally start when you want to maximize your bang for buck. And it sounds like, do you think the same is true for the sort of rail system generally?
Bill Moyer
I think it's absolutely true. And it's also, you can do the math; it's out there. Basically, it's a $15 billion project to implement this in the Pacific Northwest versus $150 billion to do this undefined corridor. We're talking 99 miles of tunnel. You're talking about three decades instead of one decade.
David Roberts
Luckily, large construction projects in the US always come in under time and on budget.
Bill Moyer
All right, that's right, that's the norm. But we've already actually paid for the declogging of the BNSF system in the Pacific Northwest, which is all part of this master agreement. And it was to make room for a functional passenger rail system that we never got. But our politicians were attracted to the flashy object. They were manipulated by WSP, Parsons Brinckerhoff, and Microsoft. And that sucks, right? That just basically sucks.
David Roberts
So, I mean, this sounds like it's just a nest, a thicket. A thicket of difficulties here. Maybe say one or two incremental things that you think are actually realistic, that some identifiable body of people might be able to do to move us in this direction. And I know that some of those are relatively obscure regulatory stuff. And then give us a more satisfying answer, something big like what would you do if you were king for a day and you really wanted to actually solve the problem?
Bill Moyer
Well, okay, starting with the incremental, here's the good news: I think it's actually starting to happen. Like when we wrote the book and even started before that in 2013, getting ready to write the book. Nobody was really talking about this. And now the public is starting to pay attention and people are connecting the dots from a lot of perspectives, whether it's railroad work or environmental justice organizers or climate activists or rural communities. Freaking Kinder Morgan, for God's sakes, was complaining about the monopolistic behaviors of the railroad industry at a Surface Transportation Board hearing.
David Roberts
Well, I mean, I just have to say this again, like the idea that if you hand railroads over to a single company and they have monopolistic control over the railroad, they're going to do bad things with that. I feel like we learned that lesson already and we're just like, "Eh," we just went back to it.
Bill Moyer
Yeah, yeah. Okay. Let's try to stay on the positive side here.
David Roberts
Right. We're talking solutions.
Bill Moyer
People are getting sick and tired of it, and people actually do love trains. So, I think that there's an angle around passenger service. It really matters because, despite what everybody thinks they know to be true, that "Oh no, the passenger trains have to wait for the freight trains." It's actually the opposite; by statute, freight trains are supposed to yield to passenger trains. Sadly though, the only recourse is a complaint to the Surface Transportation Board. But that is being — there's a piece of legislation, national legislation, that's now trying to change that so that states and Amtrak can sue the railroads for keeping their trains from being on time.
So, that's a positive thing. I think enforcing preference is positive and I think there's a lot of momentum for that. I think the environmental justice communities and, you know, everything I listened to. I think every other episode is probably more often — it's like, and then there's California, you know. Right. Like California, California, you know, is a place of experimentation and they're trying to solve problems. And California's Air Resources Board created a new framework for electrifying railroads. Sadly, their framework has to be, cannot go into effect until the EPA gives them their waiver in order to enforce it.
David Roberts
Which may or may not definitely happen, depending on what happens in the coming weeks.
Bill Moyer
Right. And even if it does happen, it'll probably be fought in the Supreme Court. This is where, like this leveling the playing field idea that the railroads say, "Well, let's level the playing field. Let's just have the EPA do a rule or a framework for transitioning." Maybe the railroads would fight that less if there was a plan for public engagement on the electrification and transmission fronts. These things can be accomplished, like the return of service to rural places through revoking service and commodity exemptions at the Surface Transportation Board. Those are all things that can happen.
But okay, switching hats, like a king for a day thing.
David Roberts
Put your crown on.
Bill Moyer
"Oh yeah, seven and a quarter if anybody's making one for me. So, is vertical separation, at the very least, the cost of even just the mode shift element? We have the potential to save in external costs from long haul freight of $46 billion per year. And most of that, that's divided over multiple things that lots of people are interested in besides climate."
David Roberts
And the public should capture that value, right? Like, that value should go to the public, not to Berkshire Hathaway.
Bill Moyer
Right. It should go to the public. And it's costing us. We're underwriting the stock buybacks of these corporations with accidents, with wear and tear on the roads, with deaths, and the lack of electrification. All these different external costs are costs that the public's already paying.
David Roberts
Right.
Bill Moyer
So similarly, I would say, you know, with transmission, like, what's the cost of not having that?
David Roberts
Yeah.
Bill Moyer
Right, so anyway, I think we need to make those costs real and say, "Hey, you know, a vertical separation of wheels from steel," as some say.
David Roberts
So, steel being the rail lines, the idea is the public would own the lines and basically the wheels. The train companies would pay a fee to use them. That is the vertical separation.
Bill Moyer
That's vertical separation. That's the toll road for trains idea from Tom White. Now, there's also an idea that Matic Thomas in the Public Rail Now campaign, coming out of Railroad Workers United, thinks that the whole kit and caboodle should be publicly owned.
David Roberts
Steel and wheels?
Bill Moyer
Steel and wheels. But regardless, I think incentivizing the system for utilization is absolutely foundational to the public good.
David Roberts
To me, the idea that the public should own the rails themselves is so thuddingly obvious. It just is insane to me that that is not already the case. I can't believe that most people, if they hear that, are not going to feel the same way. Like, it's so obviously a national resource.
Bill Moyer
Yeah, it's our steel interstate. It's 140,000 miles. And that steel interstate could be the superhighway for electrons and it could be unlocking renewable energy assets in rural places. It could be required to serve small manufacturers and places that only can come up with one or two carloads a week or 10 carloads a week, etc. They don't have to build 52 car or 110 car unit trains.
David Roberts
Right.
Bill Moyer
And if it's an open access system like our freeways, then anybody who wants to compete for that business could be able to get on it and it should be electrified, and that should be a public endeavor as well.
David Roberts
But that would require an act of Congress.
Bill Moyer
Of course. Absolutely. Because we're not talking about a cheap deal. Right. But we don't even want to get into the weeds around the land grants and history of blah, blah, blah, all that. And they never really lived up to their obligation. But, some people think we shouldn't have to pay them anything. And others —
David Roberts
I know they've gotten so much, they've gotten so much publicly underwritten value out of it already. Like, I read some of the things that Warren Buffett said about owning a railroad and it sounds like a pain in the ass. It sounds like if you're a private company, this is not a particularly sexy or profitable business to be in. Like, I don't even, it's not super clear to me why they even want these things.
Bill Moyer
Yeah.
David Roberts
Other than just to squeeze the remaining value out of them, right? Other than to suck the husk dry.
Bill Moyer
Yeah, it's an extractive resource and it's only going to last for so long. And then what are they going to do with it? Well, we can't really afford for them to run it into the ground.
David Roberts
Because you know, the public's going to pick up the cost of cleaning it up after them and remediating, you know what I mean? Like, whatever mess they leave behind, if they go bankrupt at all. That'll be on the public too.
Bill Moyer
Oh, and then we'll say, "Oh, you know what we could really use is like a steel track-based transportation system." Oh, well, we might have to go build that maybe. Who can we pay?
David Roberts
It's kind of the same in urban, you know, again, the same in urbanism. "Like, you know what would be cool is like a series of trolleys or rails in the cities." I was like, "Oh, right, we had one of those and we pissed it away.
Bill Moyer
Yeah, it's nuts. So, yeah, the Warren Buffett piece is fascinating, and it is one of the places where I see some promise. Now, I don't know why he hasn't been on this already, but I'll tell you, his last letter to shareholders in 2024 that you're referring to, he seemed pretty down on depreciation and owning infrastructure. Then he changed the tone and said, "Oh, it's great that we own the BNSF." And then he went really down on owning transmission infrastructure. So why not relieve them? Why not create an exit, an off-ramp for these corporations?
David Roberts
We can help you with that, Warren.
Bill Moyer
Right, exactly. Let's help you with that. Because I bet when BNSF is running on track that they don't have to pay for the electrification, the fuel, or the maintenance of the track, Union Pacific is going to want a deal too. And CSX, they're all going to want to line up. But the Northern and Southern Transcons are the logical places to start because of their capacity for co-location electrification.
David Roberts
Rate for us the political plausibility of this grand stroke? Is there even a germ of the will anywhere? Is anyone in Congress thinking that big? Is that even on anyone's horizon?
Bill Moyer
You know, politicians, the last thing they want to do is be embarrassed. Right? And the part of the difficulty of rail is it's so complex that it's kind of — it can get intimidating.
David Roberts
I'm familiar from studying the electricity system, how that works.
Bill Moyer
Right. So then people just kind of shut up. But Tammy Baldwin is providing really good leadership in terms of the railroads from Wisconsin. And Senator Markey from Massachusetts is providing really important thinking and drafting, working on, you know, what would the policy look like, what would rail electrification look like? How could that happen? So, I think that those are two leaders who are doing really excellent work. I think others like Ro Khanna would jump into this. But again, this is where I feel like at this particular moment when the negative populism in this country and the sense of division is so toxic and so dangerous.
David Roberts
And the sense of rot and decline.
Bill Moyer
Yeah.
David Roberts
Which is exactly what's happening to the railroad system. I mean, people feel correctly about, in this case, what's happening.
Bill Moyer
Right. And people feel correctly that there is a legitimate grievance about being left behind.
David Roberts
Yeah.
Bill Moyer
And so, working-class people, rural people, were left behind by neoliberal policies.
David Roberts
Right. And if you want to revive small rural places, I mean, a branch of a passenger rail line coming to your small town, like, you know, that's economic development right there.
Bill Moyer
And that's what I love about the project of the Reconnect America podcast, because we're getting to talk to those people. So we're talking to Dave Strohmaier of Big Sky Passenger Rail Authority in Montana, and we're talking to Mike Beard, a former legislator who's helping return vitality to short lines in Minnesota because they actually have the numbers. Like he says, they've got it in black and white that when you return service carload service to local manufacturers and plants there, you actually stop the rural depopulation. You interrupt that cycle and you start to have those counties grow their population, grow their economies, grow their tax base.
And this is a kind of positive, making a material difference in people's lives program that I feel as a lifelong activist is really worth putting energy into. You know, hanging around and calling people racists and stuff is just really diminishing returns, man. I'm really not very interested in that.
David Roberts
I am Bill.
Bill Moyer
I'm so done. You know what I love about rail is that everybody has an interest in it, and it's not the same interest. They all have different interests, but everybody has an interest.
David Roberts
Yeah, this seems like a win, win, win, win, win, win, win. But, you know, like, part of the communication challenge here is convincing Americans, the disillusioned Americans you're referring to, that we can have nice things, that there are nice things available, that we can do things and make things better. Just that alone is a difficult challenge. So, final question. We're over time. The final question is just if you're an ordinary person, you've heard this pod, you're gripped by this idea that, like, we have this massive already built national infrastructure that we are grotesquely underutilizing and that could be so much more, that could be such a relief, emissions-wise, could help us get clean electricity, could help reconnect small towns and revitalize small towns, help rural manufacturing, et cetera, et cetera.
And they're gripped by this and they want to do something. What do ordinary people do?
Bill Moyer
Well, you know, I have to —
David Roberts
You're going to say, listen to your podcast.
Bill Moyer
Yeah, I feel a little embarrassed, but I'm like, that is kind of an obvious thing. Like, okay, listen to the Reconnect America podcast and share it with all your friends. Start talking about railroads and start talking to people about the stories they have and the memories of our elders for how the places they lived and grew up in were served, the trips that they took.
David Roberts
Yeah. Still living memory, but, you know, not for very long. A vital rail system. Yeah, barely, but.
Bill Moyer
Barely, but it exists. And honestly, you know, the poison of our current politics is that we can't talk to each other. So, try talking about something you can talk about. And talk about railroads.
David Roberts
Yeah, everybody loves railroads. It is really true. Everybody loves trains.
Bill Moyer
It's true. And if you can back that up with like, "Hey, they're actually super efficient." And I have this — maybe it's the optimist in me, but I think that people actually like connecting with other human beings. I know it's weird, but I actually think that they want to. And I think that people, they might very well be fatigued of the inability to do that. And so, I think with a little discipline, we can have conversations with each other without slipping into the rabbit holes of toxic politics. And I think that's good for us because when we start talking together and talking to each other, we start to imagine the future together and we start to actually have a vision that is shared.
David Roberts
A vision of a positive future. Good Lord, do we need one of those.
Bill Moyer
We so do. And the progressive activists who think that you can just say no to things. What I like to say is, "Our no is only as powerful as our yes is compelling." We need a really strong vision, and we're only going to get that if we really listen to people and let them help shape that vision. And rail is just — it's why it's so addictive to me, why I'm so obsessed. 10 years of this. I mean, I used to do like kayakivism and light projection and protest, blah, blah, blah. I'd so much rather go to D.C. to meet with the White House's climate office, or testify at the hearing, or meet with the Senate offices with my friends from EJ and Rural Places, and railroad workers, and workers who build locomotives, and go into a Senate and help influence the vision, then organize another protest, blockading I395 or something. You know what I mean? Believe me, man, I'm so done. I want us to do something beautiful.
David Roberts
All right, well, let's do something beautiful. That's a nice way to wrap up. Bill Moyer, thank you so much for coming on and talking through this. Thanks for keeping at it for 10 years. I do love this vision and I hope it gains momentum.
Bill Moyer
Thank you. Well, I think with your help and others, you know, I think we can do this together, but it's going to take us all. And I really appreciate you giving me this opportunity. I love your show and I've learned a lot through it, so it means a lot to me to be able to be on it.
David Roberts
Thank you for listening to Volts. It takes a village to make this podcast work. Shout out, especially, to my super producer, Kyle McDonald, who makes me and my guests sound smart every week. And it is all supported entirely by listeners like you. So, if you value conversations like this, please consider joining our community of paid subscribers at volts.wtf. Or, leaving a nice review, or telling a friend about Volts. Or all three. Thanks so much, and I'll see you next time.
Share this post