Thanks to Sheri Booms Holm for the heads up on a recent article in the Huffington Post by the Sierra Club’s Carl Pope – Speed Matters.

The article is a heads up – pointing out that Romania has better broadband than the US! Pope offers some incentives – financial and environmental – for getting us going…

Now we need to start innovating again. Broadband access is a key part of the solution to our addiction to imported oil — and to the effects of that addiction on the climate and the environment. Billions of gallons of oil each year are wasted by a couple of two-ton vehicles carrying one 175-pound person to a meeting with another 150-pound person — when, with broadband, the two could have done their work without ever starting an engine. In fact, effective broadband has been estimated to offer the potential to cut wasteful driving enough to save $20-40 billion a year. That’s a full 10 of our oil-imports bill. Overall, fully connecting America with broadband access could eliminate 13 to 22 percent of our greenhouse-gas emissions.

But this generation of Americans is not getting it done. At our present pace, it will take us 60 years to bring our broadband capacity up to the level that South Korea enjoys today.