Since 1998, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) has been publishing an "infrastructure report card" detailing the sorry state of the various parts of our infrastructure. Unfortunately, national attention on the physical infrastructure only rises when something catastrophic happens, as it did in New Orleans in 2005, in Minneapolis on Wednesday after the collapse of a large bridge, or during an electrical blackout.
Like our ecosystems, the physical infrastructure is an essential part of the economy; the economy literally rests on the foundation of ecosystems and the infrastructure. Like the various ecosystems, such as forests and grasslands, lakes and rivers, the infrastructure has increasingly been treated like an asset that can be milked for all its worth, without investment. Like our ecosystems, the neglect of our infrastructure is the result of maximizing income in the short term; instead of insuring that there is some slack in a bridge or a forest, the economy has become nonresilient.
According to the ASCE, bridges need almost $10 billion a year for the next 20 years to be in an adequate state of repair, but governments at all levels are only spending $2 billion. At the same time, cars have become bigger and have been traveling more miles since the bridges were designed and built.
But bridges are not the only problem. The ASCE report card enumerates many infrastructural problems; they estimate that $1.6 trillion needs to be spent in five years for the following sectors (each sector received a grade, mostly D-, D, and D+):
Aviation receives a D+, with airline traffic predicted to increase 4.3 percent a year through 2015.
Bridges received a C, with 27 percent rated structurally deficient or functionally obsolete.
Dams get a D, with 3,500 rated unsafe.
Drinking water is a D-, with federal funding "less than 10% of the total national requirement"
Energy (national power grid) is a D, and I will quote from the report card in full:
The U.S. power transmission system is in urgent need of modernization. Growth in electricity demand and investment in new power plants has not been matched by investment in new transmission facilities. Maintenance expenditures have decreased 1% per year since 1992. Existing transmission facilities were not designed for the current level of demand, resulting in an increased number of "bottlenecks" which increase costs to consumers and elevate the risk of blackouts.
Hazardous waste cleanup, at D, basically means superfund and other toxic sites, with possibly over 11,000 sites; "redevelopment of those sites would generate 576,373 new jobs and $1.9 billion annually for the economy."
Navigable waterways, at D-, basically means barges; a very efficient way to move freight. However, by 2020 80 percent of the locks for these waterways will be functionally obsolete.
Public parks and recreation, at C-, have a $6.1 billion backlog.
For rail, at C-: "For the first time since World War II, limited rail capacity has created significant chokepoints and delays. This problem will increase as freight rail tonnage is expected to increase at least 50% by 2020."
Roads, which one might think would have broad support, are at D, where "Total spending of $59.4 billion annually is well below the $94 billion needed annually to improve transportation infrastructure conditions nationally."
School buildings, at D, nationally require as much as $268 billion.
Probably the best is solid waste treatment, at C+, where "In 2002, the United States produced 369 million tons of solid waste of all types. Only about a quarter of that total was recycled or recovered." Yow! That's a lot of sludge, filling a lot of land.
Transit, at D+, also deserves a full quotation:
Transit use increased faster than any other mode of transportation -- up 21% -- between 1993 and 2002. Federal investment during this period stemmed the decline in the condition of existing transit infrastructure. The reduction in federal investment in real dollars since 2001 threatens this turnaround. In 2002, total capital outlays for transit were $12.3 billion. The Federal Transit Administration estimates $14.8 billion is needed annually to maintain conditions, and $20.6 billion is needed to improve to "good" conditions. Meanwhile, many major transit properties are borrowing funds to maintain operations, even as they are significantly raising fares and cutting back service.
At D-, "Aging wastewater management systems discharge billions of gallons of untreated sewage into U.S. surface waters each year," and the Bush administration is cutting funding.
Perhaps we can all agree that this is one area where governments at all levels need to step up and spend more money.
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Comments View as Flat
JMG Posted 5:11 am
03 Aug 2007
Not where the conflict arises though
"Perhaps we can all agree that this is one area where governments at all levels need to step up and spend more money."
I don't think there's much disagreement with this, or that there should be gourmet chocolate that causes healthy weight loss. I think the blood spilt over where the government is to get that money.
Save the world: Reduce greenhouse gas emissions 5% annually.
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Jon Rynn Posted 5:21 am
03 Aug 2007
Ouch! Yes, that's painful...
...because the military seems to be considered sacrosanct, and they are sitting on a half trillion dollar annual pile of cash. Then there is the upper 1%, who not only got big tax cuts from Bush, but from Reagan, we shouldn't forget. Then there's the humungous amounts of revenue that corporations are hogging because they get so many tax breaks that a huge percentage of them don't even pay taxes. So, all we have to do is go after the 3 most powerful sectors of the society -- the military, the superrich, and the big corporations. No problem!
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justlou Posted 5:31 am
03 Aug 2007
WOW!
You might also add:
Rising health care costs.
Increase in obesity and associated chronic diseases.
Approaching crises in entitlement programs.
National trade deficits.
Growing national debt.
Cost of the debacle in Iraq (in light of these numbers Iraq presents even more of an incredible opportunity cost).
The big question still seems to be: How do we maintain the unsustainable and have enough capital, resources, and energy to build the sustainable?
We might need to start asking ourselves -- how much of this deteriorating infrastructure do we absolutely have to maintain? And should we not be questioning more growth if we cannot maintain what we presently have?
And of course, why can we not build infrastructure that lasts centuries instead of decades?
And another biggie: What can we point to in our existing way of living that is truly sustainable?
And why do we not reflect all of this in our economic numbers like the GDP? I mean, should we not be in some kind of negative territory?
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Jon Rynn Posted 5:43 am
03 Aug 2007
justlou, we live in a very inefficient society...
for instance, our health care costs about 50% more than countries with single-payer systems, we have a bloated military, but I've been through that...Now, if I was going to get, well, utopian? -- I'd say that instead of spending 100s of billions upgrading roads for cars, we should spend that to construct a sustainable rail system using renewable sources for electricity. But maybe that's utopian.
Speaking of which, much of the infrastructure has been spent dragging water and gas lines and etc out to suburban sprawl. It would be a lot easier to fix up infrastructure in the city, but it was exactly because after WWII it would have taken a huge effort to upgrade the inadequately maintained cities that money was poured into the suburbs -- those nice shiny clean suburbs, which are now starting to fall apart.
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justlou Posted 6:58 am
03 Aug 2007
Design
Much of what ails us is incredibly poor design -- design that we created or inherited, that has recreated us, and that has us trapped with unimaginative, technocratic "solutions" to keeping poor design functioning.
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trock Posted 7:13 am
03 Aug 2007
Bridges, medical care and nuclear power
Maybe the bridge coming down will point to larger problems, but there is an explaination that I have.
I drove over that bridge maybe 2 times a week and the first time and everytime I drove over the bridge, I thought that they were doing the reconstuction wrong. The bridge in Minneapolis was being repaved and they had 4 lanes of traffic in each direction down to 2 lanes each way. What they did was close the east 2 lanes of the north and south bound lanes. That meant all the traffic had to use the west two lanes of the north and south bound lanes making the weight loading on the bridge unbalanced. Any stresses would have worn it out much faster. I thought a better way would have had the traffic use the outside 2 lanes for the first part of the repaving and then the inside 2 lanes for the last part of the paving.
In a well designed and built bridge, it wouldn't have mattered, but if this one was deficient as reports have said, it might have made a difference.
It's weird how some people say we need to look to France and have Nuclear socialism and have the state decide to build all kinds of Nuclear power plants, but we can't use France as a model for our health care.
In France, because the French government pays for the health care, they decide how many doctors are trained. More doctors, they can pay less. In America, the American Medical Association (AMA) decides how many doctors we have and they keep the numbers low so they can make lots of money. The AMA is a political organization and is very good at it. American doctors are the highest paid in the world.
France is much more socialitic that America, which is one reason they have Nuclear power plants, all the union labor for nuclear power and such.
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JMG Posted 4:34 pm
03 Aug 2007
Sam Smith on idea for funding public works
Save the world: Reduce greenhouse gas emissions 5% annually.
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katesisco Posted 10:07 pm
03 Aug 2007
printing $$$$
Great info! Thanks.
Infrastructure to me has the connection to the existing corporate bureaucracies. I consider public works something entirely different. The corporates use their existing "infrastructure" for profit; any change in the existing refineries, existing tankers for transport, existing dispensing truck/tractor/transport over roads, any change in the existing dispensing/fueling stations means less profit. Which also means any 'new' fuel will also use the existing methods. Probably means methane as methane (natural gas) is more readily available and convertible with less cost to fit the (again) existing infrastructure.
My guess is that unprofitable (to repair) parts of the infrastructure will be cut off and left to rot. See repeat of the inner city ghettos.
I can't resist another example here from when I was homeless and living at the SA shelter in Bowling Green KY. Walking around the area one day I saw distantly over the small homes and tree tops a expanse that one associates with a wide park or lake; when I wove through the streets to get there, I found a wide expanse alright, green grass without trees right up to the enormous empty abandoned since WWII factory once owned by GE but obviously no longer profitable; so much for capitalism concept of built-in infrastructure maintainence.
And as we all can see war is an almost constant as it is a substitute for a genuine GDP growth.
My favorite comment regarding GDP was from one of the eco mags and it stated that from the point of GDP, the best possible scenario was a wealthy cancer patient dying in the hospital and under going an expensive divorce. Now war makes sense.
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Jon Rynn Posted 12:40 am
04 Aug 2007
On printing money...
JMG, I am not an expert on the ins and outs of currency, however, the problem the US faces is that it appears that we have been printing money, particularly to finance the Iraq war. The Bush administration stopped reporting one of the main money indicators (m3?), which would show how much money they are printing.
The normal argument is that printing money creates inflation. It is very true that fixing up the infrastructure -- public works! -- would increase the wealth-generating capacity of the country, unlike military expenditure, for instance. Also, printing money would probably work best if the goods bought with the money were also made in the US.
By the way, one of the ideas I didn't push in the post was the idea of rebuilding the manufacturing sector of the US by rebuilding the infrastructure. But as to whether the printed money would simply get gobbled up by inflation, I don't know. If it was either that and no infrastructure repair, though, I'd pick infrastructure repair.
It would still be more logical to soak the military/superrich/corporations; I was just reading that in the 1970s, the highest bracket paid 70% tax rate, now they pay 35%, and the capital gains tax was 39%, not it's 15%.
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JMG Posted 3:36 am
04 Aug 2007
Printing vs virtual printing
As I understand Sam's point, it's that the Guernsey islanders consciously expanded the money supply by a fixed amount; they fixed it by printing it. It provided the liquidity necessary to promote the wealth-creating public works activity. No one else could print it, so the total of capital available was limited. That's anti-inflationary.
Whereas we use virtual printing machines; the M3 figure you allude to is (was) an imperfect measure -- an attempt by the government to get a bead on how much money the banks created by lending. This system is inflationary because banks aren't required to actually have the reserves to cover their loans; they only have to have a small fraction of their loans in reserve. The rest is virtually coined the instant they lend it. We have a huge supply of lenders all pushing loans, each one master of a virtual money press, which is why our currency is so precarious and why we're getting ready to see a collapse in the value of the dollar. I expect a bunch of actual bankruptcies before too long, as that is how all that virtual money is wrung out of the system.
The system we adopted was suitable for a new country on a lightly exploited continent; the problem is that when the frontier ended and all the resources had been capitalized on someone's books, we didn't shift to a system more suited to almost steady-state economics.
Ultimately the sustainable rate of growth in the money supply is determined by the rate of solar energy striking the earth. I am coming to think that we can only afford to let money grow in proportion to the existing capital stock at the same proportion as annual solar energy flux represents to existing capitalized infrastructure. That's why solar energy (thermal, PV, wind) represents such a good use of capital--it increases societies total capital and the efficiency with which we harvest incoming annual wealth (solar energy).
Fossil fuels are the e-z credit/payday loans of this world -- easy money that ends up eating you alive on the back side.
Nuclear power is the wild card -- as much ready energy as the fossil fuels (or more), without the carbon consequence (over the long term; nukes put out 30-60 grams CO2e per kWh; coal plants are good for something on the order of 1 kg/kWh). Perhaps it is possible to use nuclear in conjunction with the necessary contraction and convergence strategy to avoid the worst of the climate crisis we've already unleashed. But the problem is that we've never shown that we understand the relationship between money and energy availability or that we have the wisdom to live beneath our means.
Save the world: Reduce greenhouse gas emissions 5% annually.
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Jon Rynn Posted 4:15 am
04 Aug 2007
Adam Smith wrote "wealth of nations"
...to try to explain the mercantilists of the day that not gold, not money, but the goods and services produced by a nation constitutes the "wealth" of nations. It's a lesson that of course the current crop of mainstream economists have forgotten. The money supply should reflect the underlying wealth of the nation, it's not the other way around, or as my mentor, Seymour Melman, used to say, "Money is not wealth".
You raise a fascinating possibility for a sustainable money supply base -- the solar energy flux. One big question is, do you represent the flow of goods and services, which you might want to reduce to sustainable energy, or do represent the assets that create that flow? In an article I wrote about economic growth, I argued that assets are a better basis with which to judge economic growth; since using up fossil fuels is basically asset destruction (not to mention forests, oceans, atmosphere, etc), then we are experiencing negative growth (the folks at Redefining Progress are doing something similar, although it's a combination of flows and assets).
So, do we use the number of solar energy and wind systems, or the solar flux that is captured?
And back to the more technical question, again in my limited understanding of the situation, what you're saying is that to pay for public works, we print money, instead of what the Fed usually does, which is to sell treasury bonds?
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odograph Posted 8:42 am
04 Aug 2007
wealth meme
There is a recent "money versus wealth" meme bouncing around the blogs & etc.
I think it is interesting to a degree, though so too is simply reminding people that "net worth" requires that you subtract "debt."
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