Climate Change, Infrastructure and Lip Service

“Infrastructure” has become like a raging herd of elephants in a tiny room. Everybody knows our power grid, highways, dams, bridges, airports, harbors, mass transit, levees and water/sewage systems are incredibly degraded, many well passed their useful life and way below what this nation needs to rekindle productivity. The American Society of Civil Engineers gives our existing infrastructure a generous D+ and warns us that to expand and restore what we need, the United States currently needs to invest $4.6 trillion. There isn’t a legislator in this country, state of federal, who believes we will remotely approach that number. Trump proposed $1 trillion, and that never got off the ground. Democrats are suggesting $2 trillion, which creates a whole pile of a jobs, but Republicans seem to be hell-bent on opposing whatever Democrats want… even as flapping lips tell us that “infrastructure” is a bipartisan priority.

It is critical to understand the difference between taxpayer money expenditures that may be viewed as necessary but which do not have a measurable rate of return – like deploying American troops overseas – and those funds – investments – which have an actual long-term economic payback. Like infrastructure. Generating increases in productivity, creating jobs, generating a sustainable tax base and supporting overall economic growth.  

Case in point. During the Great Depression, the New Deal produced a host of upgrades and infrastructure expansion, the most salient of which was the dedication to electrical power generation, mostly massive dams that generated way more power than we needed. But that excess power was precisely what won WWII. America was able to build planes, tanks, trucks, ships, armaments and weapon systems that supplied the entire allied front, and without which Hitler very much might have prevailed. Post-WWII, that same excess power fueled our continued rise in global manufacturing for decades.

But there is a new doctrinaire, knee-jerk aversion among fiscal conservatives (exacerbated by the new GOP commitment to oppose anything Democrats embrace), against spending money for anything except defense. Texas’ recent bout with virtually total power grid collapse (and concomitant water shortage) is the classic GOP model for not spending money, even when every report, past hard-luck experience and every expert analysis predicted exactly what would become inevitable. Official Texas policy, even after sequential hurricanes and coastal surges have devasted the state over and above the damage from the recent polar vortex, is either to deny climate change or deprioritize addressing the necessary fixes. Texas, in the exclusive control of Republicans for decades, even went so far as to cut themselves off from the national power grid to avoid federal regulations. Stupid heaped onto idiotic.

Yet high on the Biden agenda is a commitment to face our infrastructure reality and beginning to tackle the upgrades and expansion obviously required. With the Democratic $1.9 trillion COVID relief reconciliation bill in the books, the Republicans in Congress are angry and ready to stop even that which makes total sense. Writing for the March 1st Los Angeles Times, Kevin Freking, Hope Yen and Josh Boak tap into the mood in Washington: “Republicans say if the White House approach on the COVID-19 relief bill — which passed the House on Saturday on a near party-line vote and heads to the Senate — is a sign of things to come for Biden’s plan on infrastructure and other initiatives, it could be a difficult road ahead in Congress…

“Both chambers of Congress will use as starting points their unsuccessful efforts to get infrastructure bills through the last session… Democrats passed a $1.5-trillion package in the House last year, but it went nowhere with the Trump administration and the Republican-led Senate. A Senate panel approved narrower bipartisan legislation in 2019 focused on reauthorizing federal transportation programs. It too flamed out as the U.S. turned its focus to elections and COVID-19.

“Biden has talked bigger numbers, and some Democrats are urging him to bypass Republicans in the closely divided Congress to address a broader range of priorities urged by interest groups… During the presidential campaign, Biden pledged to deploy $2 trillion on infrastructure and clean energy, but the White House has not ruled out an even higher price tag.

“Pointing to the storm in Texas as a ‘wake-up call’ for the need to improve energy systems and other infrastructure, Gina McCarthy, Biden’s national climate advisor, said Biden’s plan will specifically aim at green and other initiatives that promote job creation. She cited as an example federal investments to boost ‘workers that have been left behind’ by closed coal mines or power plants, as well as communities near polluting refineries and other hazards.”

But when Republicans don’t want to spend money, even on what is absolutely obvious, they have a special vocabulary to incite their base. They love attaching a label, usually a completely misused descriptive word that stirs the base. Among their favorite descriptions: anything AOC wants is bad, the Green New Deal is evil and antibusiness/energy (even though it would be greatest job creator since WWII) and Democratic recommendations are pushing creeping socialism (which really means the government is abolishing private land ownership and businesses, which couldn’t be farther from the truth).

We have become a reactive – versus proactive – nation. We don’t prepare. We do not use our massive scientific and engineering knowledge to prevent. We wait until something truly horrible happens, a litany of natural disasters, spend much more money (or incur massive losses) way beyond the cost of prevention to “recover” from that disaster… but really do very little to make sure that whatever the horrible might be, to eliminate or at least minimize its “sooner or later” impact.

I’m Peter Dekom, and we are so used to kicking the can down the road that today the can and the road are virtually unrecognizable.