"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.

...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!

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?

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.

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.

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.

HOW TO FUND PUBLIC WORKS

[From Sam Smith's Great American Political Repair Manual, Norton, 1997]

The total federal state, local and private debt in this country in 1996 was around $14 trillion. The actual money supply was just under $6 trillion. So what happened to the rest of the money?  Most of it doesn't exist and never did. We call this imaginary money debt. This debt is money that we (as individuals, companies and government)  have borrowed, primarily from private sources. As Bob Blain, a professor at Southern Illinois University, put it:

"Most debt is not the result of people borrowing money; it is the result of people not being able to repay what they owed [to banks or individuals] at some earlier time. Instead of declaring them bankrupt, creditors just add more to their debt."

This new debt is called interest. Many people think the idea of  the government printing money is shameful, yet our laws permit private financial institutions to create money all the time. Every time you fail to pay off your credit card, you're letting a banker print some more money.

You're not the first, of course. For example, when the Congress met in February 1790 to figure out how to pay off the Revolutionary War debt of $75 million, Alexander Hamilton strongly advocated issuing debt certificates and using them as money. Congressman James Jackson of Georgia warned that this would "settle upon our posterity a burden which [citizens] can neither bear nor relieve themselves from.. . . Though our present debt be but a few millions, in the course of a single century it may be multiplied to an extent we dare not think of."

An alternative to Congress borrowing money to pay off its debt would have been to have created the $75 million, using Congress's constitutional power to "coin money and regulate the value thereof." Instead Congress began a long tradition of borrowing the money that -- five trillion dollars of debt later -- many believe we can neither bear nor relieve ourselves from.

In the early 19th century, the little British Channel island of Guernsey faced a smaller but similar problem. Its sea walls were crumbling. its roads were too narrow, and it was already heavily in debt. There was little employment and people were leaving for elsewhere.

Instead of going still further into debt,  the island government simply issued 4,000 pounds in state notes to start repairs on the sea walls as well as for other needed public works. More issues followed and twenty years later the island had, in effect, printed nearly 50,000 pounds. Guernsey had more than doubled its money supply without inflation.

A report of the island's States Office in June 1946 notes that island leaders frequently commented that these public works could not have been carried out without the issues, that they had been accomplished without interest costs, and that as a result "the influx of visitors was increased, commerce was stimulated, and the prosperity of the Island vastly improved." By 1943, nearly a half million pounds worth of notes belonged to the public and was so valued that much of it was being hoarded in people's homes, awaiting  the island's liberation from the Germans.

About the same time that Guernsey started to fix its sea walls the town of Glasgow, Scotland, borrowed 60,000 pounds to build a fruit market. The Guernsey sea walls were repaid in ten years, the fruit market loan took 139. In the first part of the 20th century, Glasgow paid over a quarter million pounds in interest alone on this ancient project.

How did Guernsey avoid the fiscal disaster that conventional economics prescribed for it? First and foremost by understanding that when you build roads or sea walls or colleges or houses, you are not reducing your society's wealth. In fact, if you do it right, you are creating something that will add to its wealth. The money that was created was simply backed by public works rather than gold or "full faith and credit." It was, in fact, based on something more solid than the dollar bills in our wallets today. In contrast, tacking on an interest charge to public works -- as we do in the US -- creates no new wealth, but merely transfers claims on existing wealth from debtors to creditors.

P.S.

It might help if we stopped using the word "infrastructure" and went back to "public works." The growth of the former word curiously coincides with the deterioration of the latter's substance. Could it be that "infrastructure" seemed too remote and academic while "public works" we use every day?

Save the world: Reduce greenhouse gas emissions 5% annually.

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.  

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%.

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.

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."