Dispatch from the Empire Builder: Havre at midnight?

After crawling across North Dakota, trapped in the La Brea Tar Pits of rail traffic, brought on by a combination of oil field development, oil exporting, and the usual grain shipments, we made it to Havre, Montana at 11--about 8 hours late. My mother used to say "Never ship a corpse on the Erie Lackawanna because it won't get where it's going in time for resurrection day." I guess it's time to let the Erie off the hook and replace it with Amtrak...

But what's wrong with this picture. Why are we moving oil and gas to export terminals anyway? And this NoDak biz has extractable reserves estimated at just about 14 months of use for the US. Yep. 14 months. Makes me wonder why we aren't investing in alternative energy and leaving NoDak (and all the other FrackVilles) alone. And while we are on the subject of energy efficiency, how about investing in high speed rail?

"Nice rant, Jack. If you read what I read you would read the reason. Capital em-oh-en-ee-why. Yep Jack, the reason is jack and I don't mean Jack with a capital J as in Jack D'Mestiere."