Are politicians causing global climate change?

I know a lot of 'hot air' comes out of those political meetings but that's not what we're talking about here. It is snow plowing and removal.

Anyone who lives in the snow belt, knows what I'm talking about. Every year you get one super snow storm that dumps 4 to 6 inches of snow, drifting snow and then the temperature plummets way below 0.

Although some of the major arteries are plowed within 24 hours, this is not the end of the problem. Snow plows push the snow into curb lane and a 6 lane thoroughfare is effectively turned into 4 lanes.

In addition, cars turn intersections into sheets of ice from braking and spinning tires while accelerating. So perhaps only 70% of the cars get through a traffic light compared to summer time. Add to this that you have only 2/3 of the lanes, and you really slow traffic down. (more idling at intersections causing global warming?) Turning your motor off while waiting for a traffic light is not an option when the temperature is 20 or 30 below zero.

Downtown traffic grinds to a halt and a half hour commute home turns into a 90 minute drive/idle. Lets look at the financial cost. If 10,000 people each take an extra half hour each way at say $25/hr, that's half a million dollars in lost productivity per day or $2.5 million per week.

However, how much pollution and greenhouse gasses are we pumping into the air by having 10,000 cars idling for an extra hour per day? Every year, our City Hall is surprised by sudden snow dump and studies the bottlenecks in snow plowing and snow removal. They cite budgets and how we've overspent snow budget in 12 out of the last 14 years. My only thought was, if the guy can't guess better than that, perhaps it is time to fire him?

Then there are the inevidible fender benders, cars stuck or spinning going up hill and the frustration of being stuck in traffic for an extra hour per day.

Public transportation is not much of an option in our city. One of my co-workers takes 2 and a half hours to get home by bus and Light Rail Transit or he can drive in about 40 minutes. He is eco-friendly so spends 5 hours per day on public transit (summer time).

Let's not even talk about the less major streets or side streets. In our city residential streets are plowed about once every ten years. This year, I heard some areas of the city couldn't get their car out for 5 days.

I live in between 2 schools. At one of the schools, kids had to climb over a 3 foot high, 6 foot wide snow drift to get to where the school busses normally park. In front of the school, the 2 west bound lanes were covered by a huge snow drift for 5 days and since someone was parked in the east bound lane, you had one lane for 2 way traffic.

At the other school, the snow was plowed to the side but that meant in order to pass the 10 parked school busses, you had to drive with half your car over the center line. The road curves slightly, so you hope no one coming in the opposite direction is doing the same thing.

After about 10 days, the major streets are plowed and the intersections are sanded. Traffic is getting back to normal. However, on residential streets, the ruts are deep and my mid-size car scraped bottom twice. The alley is worse, 5 foot snow drifts. I drive on high ground but if I fall into ruts, I think it will be up to roof rack. The garbage truck really churned up the snow. Will consider a gas guzzling Hummer type, snow-friendly vehicle next time.

What have we learned from this? Not much. It seems in the last 20 years that politicians are relying more and more on global warming to clear the streets of snow. I'm sure they have given that big yellow disk in the sky an employee number.

I think we have less snow than 20 years ago. However, this global warming seems a slow and tedious thing. Is there any way, we can speed up climate change? If we have to sacrifice parts of California to the sea, we are willing to do that.

Desire To Know   http://desiretoknow.com/Environment/Climate-change