Heat waves and flooding: Why U.S. infrastructure can't withstand extreme weather
axios.com
axios.com
"U.S. Infrastructure" is some of the best of the world and also varies WILDLY between states. Each state manages its own infrastructure, so it's unfair to compare the US as a whole vs individual states.
The weather in Illinois is much more robust than say, Germany or the UK. The UK is much closer to the weather of Portland than that of Illinois.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/264753/ranking-of-countr...
Broken down by state is also interesting
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/infrastruct...
Just to put it into perspective -- Illinois gets >60% of it's energy from clean sources (nuclear, solar, wind) - compare to germany (85% fossil fuels). You can travel around the state going 70+mph and hit any major city. You can take public transit from the suburbs of Chicago down town and get around easily. You can also take trains from the southern cities to Chicago in 2-3hrs (I've done this regularly). There are multiple airports, and one of the largest hubs in the world. Some of the tallest buildings in the world, massive bridges all over the place, there's almost never blackouts (very stable energy grid), fiber is available in most places at this point, clean water is abundant, etc, etc.
https://certasun.com/illinois-energy-generation/
That's just Illinois.
Places like Tennessee, Georgia, Texas, etc. you can get 10Gb/s fiber for $70/month; there's massive dams, again very high quality roads interconnecting most towns and cities, air conditioning is available everywhere that wants it, etc.
Yes, the United States is the richest and easily one of the most advanced countries in the world by almost any measure (including infrastructure).
Where specifically can you get that and via which carrier? Mine is $70 for 1Gb/s in central Austin, via Google Fiber.
[0] https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_TheGlobalCompetitivenessRe...
Why is no one comparing gay rights in Massachusetts to Hungary? But everyone is comparing gay rights in Mississippi to Norway?
There's a lot of variance in the US and the EU. There's even a lot of variance in a single state like California!
The US - by design - is supposed to be pretty similar to the EU - in that the states have A LOT of rights and autonomy.
Frankly, I'm willing to let Mississippi and Alabama do what they want if that means they don't get to tell New York and California what they can and can't do.
The vast, vast majority of the US does not live in ultra conservative counties. Even within a state like Texas that has some crazy laws, a lot of that is undone in the metros where everyone lives - Houston, Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, & El Paso are all decently liberal and make up >50% of Texas's population.
The idea that Texas is "a 3rd world country" is laughable. But you'll hear this from the "left" that wants to take states rights away so they can tell the "right" how to live. They never really think about what it would be like if the "right" got the say to tell them how to live...
*whatever that means for the US Greatest du jour
I suppose "stop bullying/oppressing" is a type of telling people how to live.
And a lot of those huge states are filled with a whole lot of nobody. The US population is fairly concentrated: one-third lives in a county on a coastline:
* https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/07/millions-of-a...
And two-thirds live with-in 100 miles (160 km) of the border:
* https://www.aclu.org/other/constitution-100-mile-border-zone
80% lives in urban areas:
* https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/guidance/g...
Yes, the US and particular states are big, but where people actually live is in a much smaller area. Concentrate infrastructure spending there.
My parents recall potholes so bad it'd destroy your car in the 80s. Concrete and the ability to fill potholes have improved over time. There's little reason to assume it's any worse than before, except some roads need replacement... but if you don't replace it (or prior to building the road) it was clearly worse.
> It doesn't change the fact that we used to be able to do routine maintenance that covered this, and now we don't.
When you first build a road you don't need to do said maintenance. So as we expand the number of roads and convert them from gravel to concrete, you'll have more potholes. It's not clear it's any worse per-mile of concrete road than before. But even if it was "worse" we have significantly more road than say 30 years ago.
Observations I've made:
* Snow plows have 2 functions: moving snow and making potholes. The frequency of pothole complaints starts climbing in November and peaks around April (when construction season gets started).
* "that pothole has been there 20 years" typically actually means "that pothole is near where a different one was located at some point in the last couple decades", or "that's a spot where the plows often can tear up the road"
* The people who often complain about potholes on some stretch of road tend to suddenly be the people who complain about how re-doing that stretch of road is a waste of money because "it was just fine before".
* 10 years after a re-pave when some street gets it's first new pothole - "ugh they just redid this road and it's already got potholes? typical $city_name"
Is it? At best it seems average, on average.
Yeap. It's pretty much a feature of suburbs. They don't generate nearly enough revenue to pay for their infrastructure. The only solution is to pack them more tightly and mix and match with businesses.
It’s unreasonable to expect a blizzard in southern Texas. It would be unreasonalbe to expect snow in Miami.
No country could deal with it. It’s not a US problem.
Texas' grid failure was absolutely a planning/operations failure and should have had the capacity to operate during a blizzard.
(And extended heat waves, too. But still a hypothetical for now)
It was a widespread infrastructure failure that ultimately caused the power grid to fail too.
> The widespread winter storm produced low temperatures across the region. This is an unusual event, much worse than the worst case that was considered in recent prior planning. The result was loss of power plants, loss of natural gas supply, felled power transmission lines, damaged gas pipelines, damage to water systems, and so on, across the board. There was a loss of more than 50 percent of generation capacity at the same moment as electric power demand surged above the predicted peak forecast.
Sure you assess probabilities in your design, but not to the point of assuming the most probable outcome will always obtain. If there's only a 2% probability of some unwanted outcome need to consider not only the probability but what's at risk if your probability assessment turns out to be wrong, and make sure at least some of your infrastructure is bomb proof.
It's unreasonable to expect those things as the norm, it's not at all unreasonable to expect that they might occur and have some sort of contingency plan in place. You'd have to have been living under a rock for the last 30 years to ignore the possibility of freak weather events.
Yes, but it would be unreasonable to expect my ribcage to withstand a 12 gauge buckshot from point blank range.
You could argue that I could wear a bulletproof vest. That would stop the said 12 gauge buckshot blast, but would it be reasonable to wear it in the first place?
Finding a way to collect that rain and get it down into the aquafer would also mean they wouldn't have to keep drilling deeper wells to reach it.
Nature already has a perfectly good system to deal with excess rain. Rivers expand to fill flood plains to buffer the excess water. Unfortunately we've blocked nature from doing this by building levees and otherwise channelizing rivers.
We've "gotten away with it" in large part, but ultimately somewhere is going to flood as climate events get more extreme. We'd be better off choosing to let farm fields flood a little on semi-regular occasions than building levees to the point that flood stage raises even higher and it's a complete catastrophe when a levee breaches near a city or town.
I think it's not so simple. Flood plains are agriculturally very productive, close to a river it's near transportation and a source of fresh water. Famously, the 4 Cradles of Civilization developed along rivers. I dont think we can assume we can simply abandon the riparian zones and continue along for the better.
Thus deferred maintenance …
We’ve been able to put a man on the moon, build nanometer scale transistors, and created tools to collaborate effectively without having to physically meet (for example, Git). Wouldn’t it be possible too to solve global warming?
[1] Which are hard enough to solve without malicious actors actively undermining us.
We "unchanged" are a exponential curve, bumping against a linear ceiling and this needs to fixed first, to even have the mental tooling and stability to handle grand projects.
I guess that's true in the technical sense, but it doesn't mean much. Electric cars were a thing in the 19th century, yet it was only in the past decade or so that they gotten popular. Would you characterize the failure of electric cars to get traction as "The problem isn't technological, it's political"?
The first result for "cost to decarbonize"[1] says it would cost $340T, compared to global GDP of $80T. You could argue that it's a political problem that we're not allocating our budget towards that goal, but at the same time you could argue that if technology improved it would be a much easier pill to swallow.
[1] https://boereport.com/2019/02/26/the-cost-of-decarbonization...
https://www.npr.org/2022/06/30/1103595898/supreme-court-epa-...
But those systems and beliefs are orthogonal. Corporatists just picks the parts of capitalism they like and ignores the rest.
Corporatists = greedy
But why though?
Can you really ascribe character traits to these groups with a single brush?
The only way I can think of is that communism frequently devolves into a dictatorship and if that dictator is more motivated to solve climate change than the democracy he'll do a better job solving it.
That and communist countries tend to be really poor which usually results in less carbon use per person.
Anyway you don't even need to endorse communism per se to point out that the current setup is pretty fucked and entirely incapable of cleaning up the mess it has created.
The conflation of democracy/capitalism and dictatorship/communism is dated and not very useful either. We haven't seen a new communist state rise in a generation or more so it's not clear if that cold war logic holds. Meanwhile we've seen plenty of capitalist dictatorships, and an increasingly authoritarian swerve in a lot of solidly market-based economies so idk. Doesn't seem like a strong link to me.
Because even dictators realized that free markets are very effective. Just like science is very effective.
Trying to run a country without free markets is like trying to run a country without science. You can try but you'll be doomed to insignificance and pushed to the margins of the world.
It's completely deranged to think there is exactly one economic structure that can function. Capitalism won, absolutely, I wouldn't dispute that. But taking its victory as inevitable and permanent is such a failure of imagination.
Like thinking cats are the only viable mammals because lions dominate their ecosystems. There are other ecosystems! Mice still exist. Carnivores are vulnerable to their ecosystems changing and boooooy are the ecosystems changing.
You talk of imagination but you haven't even described your solution or why it would be better than the well studied economics concepts of free markets with carbon taxes.
At the same time I'm not a scholar, historian, economist, politician, or powerful military leader. My capacity to conceive of another future, or author it, is constrained. My ability to condemn evil where I find it is not, however.
It's like a diabetic stopping their insulin in the hopes something better will come along.
They said we must replace capitalism because of the horrors it perpetrates.
That is a very strong statement.
But I guess they could be saying "we are morally compelled to replace capitalism with a system that may or not work exist that may or may not solve the problems we have attributed to capitalism without showing that any other workable system fixes these problems, only that they happen to exist under our current system."
Which doesn't strike me as the most useful criticism of capitalism.
The person you're replying to has already expressed doubt about whether it's a simple capitalism/communism dichotomy. Responding to a communist straw man of your own creation isn't helpful.
No idea if it would work in practice, but we need to move beyond this mindset that there are only two possible options for how to structure an economy.
Which also doesn't prevent inequality. If software engineers own Google, and baristas own Starbucks, what with Google being way more profitable, the software engineers will still be much richer than the baristas.
Free markets with a tax funded social safety net seems like a much more efficient way of reducing inequality to me.
What other ways are there to organize markets or the economy have there been that we've seen at a country scale?
>Anyway you don't even need to endorse communism per se to point out that the current setup is pretty fucked and entirely incapable of cleaning up the mess it has created.
I think it's easy to blame every woe that we have such as climate change on "capitalism" without offering an alternative. The reason we have emitted a lot of carbon is capitalism made us a rich, and we don't care enough to stop it. Capitalism is at fault only in the sense that it made us rich.
> The conflation of democracy/capitalism and dictatorship/communism is dated and not very useful either. We haven't seen a new communist state rise in a generation or more so it's not clear if that cold war logic holds. Meanwhile we've seen plenty of capitalist dictatorships, and an increasingly authoritarian swerve in a lot of solidly market-based economies so idk. Doesn't seem like a strong link to me.
There are plenty of market based economies that more or less function like a democracy. I'm not aware of any communist countries that function like a democracy.
How do you propose to implement and maintain your communism without some system of government that's up at the totalitarian end of the spectrum?
Are non-capitalist economies any better? ie. are there non-capitalist economies out there with fossil fuel reserves that aren't extracting/burning them?
You do realize their impact is very small.
- Every single place on the earth up to the year 2000 had an average temperature as well as a max and min temperature, along with a variance of predictability along those days. What do we need for our communities to stay stable if the max goes up, the min goes down, the variance of predictability goes up (and continues to go up every year)?
There is no missing piece. We all know we need to drastically cut carbon emissions, capture as much carbon as we can, and use energy sources that do not emit carbon into the atmosphere. That's pretty much it.
So the only argument for "this will lower quality of life" is that things might become more expensive. But renewable energy in fairly cheap, so I'm not convinced that on average quality of life will suffer. Some things will get more expensive, others will get cheaper.
You're missing one of the biggest contributors: construction. Cement and steel are both huge sources of carbon emissions. There are potential solutions to this, but it's another very difficult area to transition.