It looks like my website was down for a while. I’m glad to see it’s back up again.

California has plans to spend $40 billion on a high speed rail system from Sacramento to San Diego. The train has multiple stops along the way including Los Angeles, Fresno, San Jose, and San Francisco.

According to the site, the 220 mph train will provide the same traffic throughput as $82 billion dollars in infrastructure. It will also provide a less expensive, more environmentally friendly travel option. Not to mention being 3x faster than driving a car.

This November Californians will vote on a ten billion dollar bond to begin the project. Such a move could begin the revitalizing of passenger train infrastructure and promote a more environmentally friendly America.

It seems the entire country is”;Going Green” or at least pretending to. From hotel rooms to Wal-Mart, from Barack Obama to John McCain, from California to Florida everyone is trying to be green.

As Bruce Banner will tell you, it’s not easy being green. It’s not about going out and buying a hybrid or installing solar panels on your house. Although, how cool would it be to power your electric car from your own solar panels?

There are beaucoups of tiny lifestyle changes that have an impact. Take, for example, the food you eat. We are accustomed to having bananas, oranges, and apples available to us all year. We don’t, however, think of the planes, trains, and automobiles those fruit had to travel on to get to the supermarket. Eating locally reduces the mile your food travels. Lowering the demand for gas, thereby lowing the cost of gas.

Such thinking has led Dickson Despomier to develop the idea of vertical farming. This would allow people in cities to start eating food grown locally. It would also provide the year-round luxury that our society has grown accustomed to.

While it might be a costly solution, it is gaining some traction. That’s not really the point, though. It’s the little things, multiplied hundreds of thousands of times that make the real impact. It’s eating local apples, not buying bottled water from the Fuji islands, not buying bottled water at all.

We’re becoming a globally aware society. The world is getting smaller and flatter, and it’s hard, but a cleaner, greener, more ecologically diverse planet is worth it.