The vital systems we rely on (roads, bridges, buildings, pipes, and much much more) are crumbling and in desperate need of repairs. Worse, many of these systems are coming up on the end of their life and will require trillions of dollars to fix - just to maintain the economic status quo. Funding is becoming increasingly difficult to find, all while costs are soaring. Can we get out of this infrastructure mess or are we facing the end of the road?
David Torcivia:
[0:00] Hey everyone this is David Torcivia.
Daniel Forkner:
[0:02] This is Daniel forkner.
David Torcivia:
[0:03] And this is Ashes Ashes, a podcast where we discuss the systemic issues of our world and the things that we can or can't do about them.
Daniel Forkner:
[0:12] Today we're going to be talking about infrastructure.
This is the foundation that makes our life possible; the things that you can see like roads, and bridges, and also the things that you don't see like water pipes, subway lines, and the foundations of all our buildings and structures.
And it is this foundation that allows us to grow economically and live our lives day-to-day, and it’s starting to show its age, and that could be unsettling for a number of reasons.
To put it bluntly a lot of this infrastructure is starting to crack and fail in a number of ways. The American Society of Civil Engineers for example came out with a big report this year in 2017 in which it gave the United States infrastructure one grade above failing.
So it's important to be aware of how this infrastructure is so necessary to our lives and what we could be looking at in terms of its inability to function the way we've come to rely on it.
David Torcivia:
[1:04] So let's look at a real world example of this infrastructure failing us and failing individual people and really putting their lives at risk. Everyone has seen in the news Flint, Michigan right? This is a problem has been going on for at this point years. Lack of upkeep of their water pipes, lack of money for repairs has created a public health pandemic really. People can't drink the water coming out of their pipes because of lead and other chemicals and metals that have seeped into this water from these old dilapidated water pipes that ended up this way because the infrastructure itself just wasn't kept up-to-date.
And now the city itself is dying because of this. You’ve seen huge drives to bring people water and awareness. It ended in lots of plastic bottles and stuff but very little has actually changed on the ground, and though the state is finally moving forward and helping the local municipalities in dealing with this problem, fact of the matter is this is just a very expensive thing to fix.
And there's a lot of reticence from politicians to get involved because while they take care and want to be involved and get rid of this bad PR nightmare that's going on, the money involved in order to fix something of this scale - this magnitude - is just enormous.
Daniel Forkner:
[2:12] To take another similar example in Los Angeles today, somewhere between 14% and 18% of their treated water is wasted towards leakage that's coming out of these aging pipes that were built to last only about a hundred years, and are starting to fail in a lot of ways. It's estimated that 1.3 billion dollars is needed to fix a lot of the worst current pipes in Los Angeles, and that's only 6% of their total pipes. The city is currently operating at a 300-year replacement cycle with a lot of their pipes; they're trying to get to a 250 year replacement cycle for pipes that were only meant to last for a hundred years in the first place.
David Torcivia:
[2:52] And that's optimistic in a lot of places too, because while the pipes themselves may physically survive a hundred years, the water and stuff seeps chemicals and things out of these pipes and you end up with situations like Flint. So the water may not be leaking but it still may not be usable or people's health.
Daniel Forkner:
[3:08] Those are two water cases and to take just a couple more quick examples: the DC Metro, this underground subway network that was a shining beacon in 1976 when it was first introduced, because of neglected maintenance and repairs, the chairman of their transit system came out last year with the startling announcement that if they don't shut down the metro [for months at a time] and make these major repairs it won't be running at all in the next 10 years.
David Torcivia:
[3:35] In New York we’re facing similar metro problems. Because it's a 24-hour system that runs all the time and services thousands of miles of track, there's very little time for them to actually perform repairs. You add that into the fact that in the middle of the 1900s, there's about a 30-year block where governors refused to raise the rates on the subway. And so the subway which wanted to raise the prices but couldn't because it was politically inconvenient for these politicians, just kept referring repairs for decades and now that's really all caught up and we're facing huge amounts of delays, there’re billions of dollars of shortfalls in terms of money we need to make these repairs, and we’re seeing delays in trains, slower service, but also actual dangerous moments. We’ve had trains derail and all sorts of things. So again this is a great example that these things that seem like it's just “oh we’ll shift this schedule a little bit” ends up having real actual consequences on people's health and safety.
Daniel Forkner:
[4:32] Why don't we take a minute David to kind of explore how we got here in the first place. These are a couple of good examples we've outline but this whole system of infrastructure and deferred maintenance is really catching up to us in a lot of different ways.
David Torcivia:
[4:45] So yeah let's jump back in time to look at when these big infrastructure projects first started happening. So of course there was the New Deal stuff going on with FDR, but I really want to focus on the construction of the highway interstate system, because that had a huge effect of the country's economy. It had effect on all sorts of things: created industries, created towns, destroyed towns depending on where these highways went down, and it really sort of reshaped the country.
Today we're left with this legacy; we have these highways still, the routes they took still define the way our country is shaped - in terms of demographics and stuff - this legacy is with us today.
[5:19] But also at the same time the legacy of this infrastructure lives on. A lot of these roads and bridges that were built at the time and were updated and built anywhere from the 1950s to the mid-1970s, were really only designed to last 50 to 75 years. And so we're getting up to the point where a lot of this stuff is reaching the end of its life. And at the time when this was all first built it there was lots of political will and lots of money available to construct these things, because it's new construction, increasing the economy, it's a huge dramatic thing that sees a lot of economic benefit from that. But when we jump to today, and we're just repairing these things that we’re already depending on to maintain the current economic growth that we’ve have, that suddenly becomes a lot more difficult, because investing money back into this isn't seeing direct economic benefits; it’s just maintenance money to maintain the status quo. There's a lot less political will for that, and though everybody will say infrastructure is great, and they want to spend on it, when it actually comes down to dollars, there’s really only money set aside for new infrastructure construction. It's much harder to get money set aside for maintenance, upgrades, repairs, even when these repairs are desperately needed.
For example, 10% of the country's bridges - and we have a lot of bridges, we have over 600,000 bridges in the United States - 10% of these, so over 60,000, are considered structurally deficient which is the lowest possible ranking that engineers can give to a bridge, it means it needs to be torn down and rebuilt. That’s 60,000 bridges, there's one in every state, and some of these are in very big areas. 60% of these are high-traffic bridges in major cities - places like Boston - and they're basically deathtraps waiting to collapse. We saw this as a couple years ago one of these major bridges collapsed, cars fell in the river, people died.
[6:58] This is a very real problem, and there's no money set aside for this to fix these. There are efforts to push through bills to set aside money to address some of these most dangerous infrastructure portions, but it's really difficult to push this through because again when you just look at a bridge it looks fine; there's no big ribbon cutting the happens and shutting them down - rebuilding them - makes taxpayers angry. You have to reroute traffic, it's very expensive, it's politically inconvenient, everybody sort of loses and this money that could go to building something new, and increasing economic growth through that is instead forced to go to the side just to maintain the status quo, and our status quo becomes more and more expensive to keep up.
Daniel Forkner:
[7:32] That's a great point David and like you said a lot of these problems are because we built things that weren't meant to last that long. You just mentioned bridges and I think 55% of all our bridges are over 40 years old and most of them were built with only a 50 year life span intended.
And that's a big part of this but another part of this is just the way that we grew in the first place. As we scaled things to the automobile we built these massive highway networks, we also encouraged a lot of suburban sprawl. One of the consequences of sprawling out like we have done is that the revenue that you collect from your growing population is outpaced by the growing liability associated with this infrastructure.
So if you take Lafayette in Louisiana for example, In 1949 they had 5 feet of water pipes per person. As the population grew to 2015 their population tripled but the number of pipes per person increase by a magnitude of 10. So 56 feet of pipes per person.
That's part of this problem is that we have to build more and more infrastructure to support our population growth, but we're also building the infrastructure in order to grow our population so that we can help to pay for it. So it’s kind of a vicious cycle. And because a lot of this infrastructure was paid for by borrowed money, the hope has always been that even if we can't afford it now, we're going to grow our way out of the problem it's really only dug us a deeper hole for ourselves.
David Torcivia:
[8:59] Yeah Daniel exactly I think you really hit on one of the deadly cycles of infrastructure here which is “okay we're going to fund this infrastructure now, and we’re going to take on debt to build this. But it'll be okay because once we complete this infrastructure, our municipality, our county, our city, whatever is going to see growth as people come to use this. Whether it’s new roads, new pipes, whatever we're building.” It allows more people to come in and move in and then take advantage of this.
But as more people move in, now we need more infrastructure to support that, and we get caught in this loop like: more people come, we need to build more stuff and blah blah blah, and eventually you get to some point where your infrastructure spending can’t keep up with your tax base growth. And that's when you reach the peak of this cycle and it all goes downhill from there because once your infrastructure spending can't keep up, whether that’s because you can't add debt fast enough to build this, you had to cut taxes or your tax basis isn’t growing fast enough, or that maintenance factor which you didn't account for in the beginning is starting to grow too much and you can't keep up both with repairing infrastructure and building the new stuff that you want to.
So as your infrastructure starts slowly collapsing, or getting shoddy, you start losing residents. Less people come in, your tax base isn’t growing as fast, so you have less to spend on infrastructure, which makes the cycle worse. Eventually you start losing people, that tax base starts shrinking, and then from there the whole system just totally collapses. There’s no money to pay for the improvement in infrastructure, infrastructure collapses and then you lose your tax base even faster from that.
You see that in a small scale in cities when people start getting frustrated with the city and moving somewhere out, and moving to the suburbs with left a lot of the cities in disarray and ruin and bankrupt in the 1980s, and we’re seeing it now in rural America in a huge, huge degree.
Daniel Forkner:
[10:41] Yeah it's kind of this idea that you can pay for maintenance now or you can kick this can down the road and try to pay for it later. Of course the problem is the further you kick that can down the road, the more these cost kind of balloon, both directly in the form of having to repair or replace these failing systems, and indirectly because as infrastructure starts to function less and less, we have an economic impact right? We have delays; we have wear and tear on vehicles that have to drive down rocky roads or deal with potholes; we have lost jobs and lost economic activity as a result of some of these infrastructure problems.
You mentioned rural areas. A lot of rural municipalities faced with these ballooning liabilities have opted to simply just dig up their asphalt roads and just lay gravel roads down because it's a lot cheaper to maintain.
David Torcivia:
[11:32] Yeah this is what progress really looks like in 2017. This is a relatively new phenomenon, it's only shown up in the past 5 years or so. Which interestingly enough isn't tied in with the recession. A lot of people seem to blame this on “oh yeah 2008 was bad, municipalities started going broke, they had to do this but now things are okay.” But no this is while the economy is doing great. Part of it is big demographic shifts - lots of people are moving out of rural areas and ending up in the urban areas. Part of it is the cost of upkeeping this infrastructure has just grown too much.
One, because of a declining tax base. Two, because of increased costs of infrastructure. So asphalt, concrete, it's a lot more expensive now than they used to be. They’ve grown in cost at a rate faster than inflation, and much faster than taxes have risen. So these municipalities have no choice but to literally dig up asphalt roads, which is you know, what is more American than a road in the middle of nowhere with a pickup truck cruising down it? Well now that road is ripped up, it's just dirt road because that's all we can afford anymore.
It's really sort of an interesting thing, and I don't think it's necessarily bad; we have too much asphalt as it is. But one thing to note is while these towns celebrate this is a progressive move, what it's doing a lot is shifting costs from the municipality on to the people who live in that municipality. So instead of collecting tax money to build this stuff, they defer increasing taxes and instead let you suffer increase wear and tear on your vehicle, your tires, your axles, the actual physical appearance of the vehicle from pings and rocks hitting it, and all of this is impacting how much money you have and how much money you have to spend on upkeep and stuff. So they're shifting costs from keeping up roads to you keeping up your automobile.
It also has an interesting side effect causing lots of people who maybe were driving smaller cars, Priuses, things that are environmentally more effective than SUVs and trucks to dump those vehicles because they're not so great on gravel roads, and instead opt up for trucks, opt for SUVs, which in a vicious cycle increases more for climate change, and also rip up these dirt and gravel roads faster, sort of causing a vicious cycle once again which costs more for the municipality to fix and makes the problem even worse. This whole system has lots of feedback loops that keep acting on each other and keep getting worse and worse.
Daniel Forkner:
[13:47] So roads are one of these things that is very visible right; one of these very apparent aspects of infrastructure. But there's a lot of infrastructure that’s hidden until it breaks. So we don't really know how important it is until it fails. Because it's hidden we don't spend as much money to maintain it, because it's not so politically easy to spend money on stuff you can't see. But then when it does fail it affects us in a very big way.
One of those things is concrete. Literally the thing we build our highways with and a lot of our buildings.
David Torcivia:
[14:16] Yeah one of those very big things that has a profound effect on everything around us and we really don't think about even though we see it everywhere is steel-reinforced concrete. What is steel-reinforced concrete? I mean that's the concrete we use to build just about everything: office building, bridges, anytime you see a piece of concrete holding something up, odds are that’s steel reinforced concrete. And what steel reinforced concrete is, it's just concrete that has steel rebar those like thick ribbed rods that you sometimes see on the side of the road or whatever. Those are inserted inside the concrete to give it strength in a different direction than concrete normally would have.
Daniel Forkner:
[14:53] And that's what gives concrete its strength right? And it's lower cost to build, and it's more efficient.
David Torcivia:
[15:00] The invention of steel reinforced concrete really like totally radicalized the construction industry, and it radicalized architecture. You saw a lot of major architects take this new idea - people like Frank Lloyd Wright - and build things that had never been possible before without it. It's an incredible product, it really reshaped the world and what we see, and it’s very cheap. So prior to that if you wanted to build a skyscraper or a tall office building or something, you would have to use very expensive steel frame buildings. Which is a very strong reliable method of construction, but it’s expensive. Concrete was another alternative, but it was slow to set. Steel-reinforced concrete though was something nice in between. It was cheap, we could lay it quickly, and it was very strong.
And when they first started constructing these things you would see people advertise and talk about it and about how these were going to be here around forever. They were predicting thousand-year buildings that would last as long as you know the Romans. A lot of the Roman construction was concrete so people pointed at that and said “we can have that too.”
[15:59] But as is the case with so many of these things, there were unforeseen consequences. And so the thing is, concrete isn't waterproof. It’s porous, it breathes, it lets water in and out, it lets air in and out, and that's part of what gives it its strength. But it's also its Achilles Heel when it's reinforced with steel because that steel inside also breeds. It gets water on it and gets air on it and it oxidizes and starts to rust. And so this thing that's holding up the concrete that gives it its strength suddenly starts turning to dust in the inside, and that causes the concrete around it to start falling apart too, this thing is called spalling. I know you’ve seen it and maybe you didn't realize what it is but when you start looking for it you'll see it everywhere.
It's that's sort of process like you see concrete sort of start chipping off; it falls off the side and becomes kind of stained, and you can sort of see these steel rebar beams inside, and once that happens the structural Integrity of this bridge, of this building, of whatever it is you're looking at is compromised. Eventually, maybe not now but maybe in a decade - much much sooner than a thousand years - that structure is going to have to be torn down and rebuilt because it's just waiting to fall down at that point.
So what we’ve ended up accidentally doing is building a sort of disposable infrastructure all around the country and all around the world. Our bridges, our buildings, all these are built on foundations built with this steel reinforced concrete that’s just waiting to collapse, and instead of having buildings and structures that are going to last us well into the next few centuries, we're already coming to the end of life of a lot of these and they need to be just completely demolished and rebuilt. And we do have alternatives; there are better types of concrete; you can do steel reinforced concrete with stainless steel rebar.
[17:38] But that's much, much, much more expensive and if we were to build things responsibly like that then it becomes too expensive to build up with the scale that we have. So we have to choose: do we build this sort of piecemeal temporary thing and benefit from the growth of that and worry about the problems later because it's going to be well past or our lifetime? Or do we build for future generations at higher costs, less stuff, but build it better?
And we just haven’t opted for that. Instead we’ve opted for a disposable infrastructure, disposable world, disposable buildings.
Daniel Forkner:
[18:09] One of the unfortunate consequences of putting off these costs and building for the short term is that now that we're facing a lot of these problems, there are so many competing demands for our funding that it becomes hard to allocate the funds necessary to fix some of these infrastructure problems. Like Miami that has to redirect funds for its pensions to some of these climate-resilient structures that it has to build on its coast.
But one of the other major factors that will make it difficult to pay for infrastructure in terms of not just new construction but these repairs and some of these replacement costs, is the rising cost of resources and materials. These aren't just the ones you normally think of like oil or natural gas, but a lot of materials that you wouldn't consider to be a problem like sand. So sand is one of these inputs that’s really important to not just construction and cement and concrete, but also it's an important input for electronics, glass, and a lot of factories. It's also used as a major input for fracking and oil extraction.
[19:10] And when you think of sand you might picture long beaches or the rolling dunes of the Sahara Desert, and it doesn't seem like it's a finite resource but it absolutely is. And what we're seeing now is that skyrocketing demand for sand as construction is booming all over the world, coupled with the fact that this resource is becoming scarce is we're seeing crises start to pop up all over the world in the form of environmental destruction, violent conflict, illegal mining, regional conflicts between different countries, and skyrocketing prices.
And it's important to point out that not all sand is equal. Dubai for example which is this city that's you know kind of famous for building these elaborate and massive construction projects, which has a lot of desert sand and all around it, has to import most of its sand from Australia because the sand they have is not suited for construction.
Florida for example has to ship a lot of their sand from Mexico and Nova Scotia in Canada, and that's unfortunate economically because construction experts will tell you in the US that if you have to ship sand more than 60 miles away from your construction area it becomes unprofitable. And India is a good example of a country that's really facing a sand crisis. India is known for the Sand Mafias that kind of support the massive construction boom going on there. A lot of people are illegally mining sand from rivers and it's destroying the river ecosystem as well as disrupting the water flow which means that local villages lose their water source.
There's a lot of violence, there's a lot of illegal trading going on around it.
David Torcivia:
[20:46] Yeah I mean in a way sand has almost become as violent and as deadly as blood diamonds.
But because you know it's not a luxury item – like diamonds it's one thing for people to boycott or protest; you know it's a very visual shiny thing and catches lots of people's interest. It's a luxury item, we don't need diamonds, at least most of us don't - industrial processes do but in your day to day life you don't encounter diamonds you don't need diamonds, and so it's very easy to say “look at all this violence that’s happening around the extraction of diamonds, this is a bad thing I'm not going to support this.”
But when that same violence happens around sand - and it is happening. In India like Daniel mention there’re mafias; there's a huge black market industry for sand; people get killed; people get forced into slavery in order to mine sand, it's a huge problem in Africa.
This is just as deadly if not more because the industry is larger than diamonds. It’s killing more people, causing more violence, but this is something we need. This is something that we absolutely have to have to sustain the construction, the economic growth, and our quality of life - you know, the status quo as a whole. And it's something hidden that we don't think about. I mean who thinks about sand in construction? Who thinks about the sand that went into our concrete or where it came from?
It's hidden, and this violence is hidden, but it's very real, it’s a very big problem, and it's getting expensive, and this is another problem infrastructure is facing.
Daniel Forkner:
[22:04] Yeah it's getting more expensive and that's really the main point here I mean even if you're someone who's not really concerned about violence in other regions or abroad, just from an economic standpoint it means rising materials cost; it means rising inputs. And if we are faced with an infrastructure that was only built to last 75 to 100 years and we need to replace it all, it's going to be a lot more expensive to do that with rising costs and these increased competing demands that we’re facing.
David Torcivia:
[22:30] Yeah and again: this repair, this replacement isn't going to bring us the same economic boom that the construction of these interstates did in the first place. This is just about maintaining what we have now. This is the bare minimum we need to keep things going on it's going to cost a lot of money and unfortunately a lot of suffering as well.
Daniel Forkner:
[22:48] Our infrastructure is so interconnected. And it's not just our highways and bridges but also our freight system which is comprised of our railroads, and our inland waterway systems, and our international shipping networks. And all these things are interconnected and if there's problems or delays in any one of them it puts additional stress on the others. So for example you know we have this very big industrial and freight infrastructure. Our inland waterways which is very important to our economy – it makes up 14% of all our domestic freight - and most of our nation's grain exports get carried at some point on these inland waterways. 50% of all the vessels on this network are experiencing delays due to aging locks which is part of this infrastructure. If the delays in our inland waterways get significant enough that people shift transportation to railroads, that means more delays on the railroad sector, so all these things are interconnected. And a lot of it we don't see and a lot of it is not just delays but it poses potential hazards to our health.
David Torcivia:
[23:46] Especially if we're talking about these hidden things, there are literally ticking time bombs under the feet of many of us.
Underground natural gas storage tanks - which is the least sexy set of words I can possibly think of - they're all over the country; they're a huge part of our infrastructure; they're very important in maintaining our oil and gas infrastructure which contributes to energy which contributes to heating, and it's a vital important part of our nation's energy independence and security. A lot of these are just sort of old oil wells that have been emptied out, there’s no more oil in it and we repurpose them by injecting natural gas down these oil wells and storing it underground into these large natural spaces.
But a lot of them leak. A lot of these weren’t designed for it; they were designed only for very briefly extracting oil. Some of them were you know 50-year lifespans, 75-year lifespans, and once again those numbers keep coming up, and we are reaching the end of those and surpassing it.
And so we're leaking huge amounts of methane, huge amounts of natural gas, which goes into the atmosphere, contributes to global warming, and causes problems all around us. Also, some of these things literally explode. There’s been cases where cracks in these protective layers cause gas to seep out and blow up in towns and people have once again died because of this. It’s a huge problem and there's very little oversight for this. There's an organization at the federal level that oversees all of these underground reservoirs, but they don't have any regulators. Nobody actually goes out to check the facilities; they've left that to the states. So every state has their own department and they go out and some of these departments are ridiculously small. Ohio just does a visual inspection once a year at each site, which isn't very useful when it's an underground storage facility, but that's all it takes to be regulated and safe.
In fact, one of these states is one of my favorite examples of this lack of regulatory oversight, and that’s Kansas. In Kansas one of these companies running these underground storage facilities sued the state saying that it wasn't their job to actually be regulating this, and that there's a federal oversight that’s supposed to be doing it and they were feeling like they were getting regulated doubly so, and the courts agreed with them. A federal court agreed and said “you know what you're right, so Kansas you're not allowed to provide any oversight to send out people to inspect these wells.” Well the federal government also doesn't want to hire anybody to do that so it ends up literally no one has checked out any of these wells. There's regulation out there but nobody's actually inspecting or enforcing and making sure anything's happening. We're just taking the word of this company that I'm sure has everyone's best interest at heart to have a very safe and structurally sound well, and trusting them that that is the case and there's no enforcement; nobody's double-checking; nobody's making sure. And that's just the way it is.
Daniel Forkner:
[26:20] And it's important to point out that in that Kansas case this court case only took place because of a fatal explosion of one of these storage leaks in the first place.
David Torcivia:
[26:29] Yeah exactly and we keep seeing this all over the place. There was one recently in California that released 88,000 metric tons of methane, which to put in perspective that’s a big number but like what does that mean? It's the same as burning 800 million gallons of gasoline.
That's a lot of stuff. This is a big impact in climate change, and these things are failing all over the place which both puts our energy storage at risk, is a physical health danger in terms of these explosions, and also is making climate change worse.
Daniel Forkner:
[27:00] And climate changes starting to impact some of these infrastructure systems. As heat rises in areas that weren't expecting it, roads crack and break. Nuclear power plants have had trouble in some areas cooling their systems because it's coming from a source of water that's too hot for them to use. Train rails will stretch and kink to excessive heat. Our electrical grid which is already at capacity has more stress added to it with increased heat.
David Torcivia:
[27:26] This year the heat in Arizona was so bad planes literally couldn't take off - talking about our air infrastructure and stuff, and it's not because of the runway being too hot or too sticky, but the temperature was too hot planes literally couldn't get enough lift to fly, and that was just, they were just grounded for days.
Daniel Forkner:
[27:43] As the climate temperature continues to rise we're seeing permafrost in the Arctic tundra start to thaw and it's impacting our energy infrastructure that we've built there.
David Torcivia:
[27:53] That's right so oil pipelines are starting to sink and crack - just as another time bomb to cause huge traumatic oil spills there in the Arctic wildlife. And then actual houses; infrastructure; hospitals; bridges; roads are crumbling and cracking as they start sinking because they had been built on this permafrost that was considered rock hard it was going to be that way forever, but that's not the case anymore and so these foundations are sinking and settling and moving as things melt and shift. And it's causing cracks in these buildings which were supposed to last until the foreseeable future are now having to be torn down, abandoned, rebuilt, and that's another drag on the economy that's expensive, insurance doesn't want to pay for this, nobody wants to raise taxes to pay for this increased maintenance on the infrastructure, and we are starting to see the consequences.
Daniel Forkner:
Actual costs look something like this: one trillion dollars is needed to maintain and meet the demand of our drinking water systems over the next 25 years.
David Torcivia:
Almost 200 billion dollars in oil and gas pipeline maintenance in the next 8 years.
Daniel Forkner:
Our bridges have a backlog of needed repairs in the range of 123 billion dollars.
David Torcivia:
Airports need a hundred billion dollars in the next two decades.
Daniel Forkner:
64 billion dollars is needed for current rehab in our dams.
David Torcivia:
Even the Society of Civil Engineers isn't sure how much it's going to cost to clean up all the toxic waste dumps we've had but it's easy to estimate in the trillions of dollars over the next century.
Daniel Forkner:
Our national levees protect 1.3 trillion dollars in property values and we need an estimated 80 billion dollars over the next 10 years to keep them in repair.
David Torcivia:
Passenger rail alone, not even counting all that freight rail and stuff, needs 30 billion dollars. Not in ten years not in five years. Right now.
Daniel Forkner:
There's a serious backlog of needs in our light rail and bus systems of 90 billion dollars which is projected to grow to 122 billion dollars by 2032.
David Torcivia:
And Roads, the big gorilla in the room, needs 700 billion dollars of fixes right now. That's not in the next 10 years, that's what they need at this moment.
And these are just the big very obvious sections of these infrastructure costs, of these needs of maintenance, and every year that these repairs aren’t made they get more expensive. So this isn't just a linear amount that’s added on each year but this grows exponentially as these repairs get worse, as they get more expensive as more and more of them appear. This is a problem that you can't keep ignoring because it keeps getting worse.
Daniel Forkner:
[30:22] We're looking at a future where we have even more debt, even more unfunded liabilities like our pensions, and a vast infrastructure that is crumbling from within that needs to be torn down and replaced, it needs to be repaired, and this is all going to be like you said in the context of exponentially rising resource and materials cost.
David Torcivia:
[30:41] Yes so really this is a thing we have to act now. There might still be time to come in and save this system. It's going to be painful; it's going to be expensive; it's going to hurt politicians, but it needs to be dealt with now.
Obama tried. He introduced an infrastructure bill as a great start. It wasn't as much as he initially hoped for. Trump came in and promised a large infrastructure bill that has not been carried through yet, and the interesting thing is infrastructure spending is actually very popular. People love it. It's something that they can see directly impacting their life. It creates new bridges, new roads, municipalities love it, cities love it, it's a very popular thing to do.
But the problem is, and the reason that it's not happening is there's just not enough money for it. Like Daniel mentioned with our debt obligations, with pensions and stuff, the budget’s already so tight and this tax bill that’s coming through that's going to cause even more deficit makes it even more difficult to find money to set aside for these needed repairs. Everyone is hoping that if they just ignore it then somebody else will have to deal with it when their turn comes around.
Daniel Forkner:
[31:43] And it's important to point out that not all infrastructure spending is equal. It’s very easy as a politician to purchase a shiny new railcar for example, and that will be included in our infrastructure spending data, but if the real necessary repairs are underground in some switch or relay that nobody can see, then buying a shiny new railcar won't necessarily solve the underlying problem.
David Torcivia:
[32:05] So Daniel what can we do?
Daniel Forkner:
[32:08] That's an interesting question. Since we are looking at a future where we're going to have more competing demands for our funding, where we are going to have more of these repairs and replacement costs, we have to realize that we can't get away anymore with this kind of wasteful short-term spending that is founded on this idea that we can experience infinite growth and abundant energy and resources. Our world is limited and we can't grow our way out of the problem forever.
David Torcivia:
[32:33] We need to stop focusing on this infinite growth and depending on growth as a way to fund these projects. When we build things we need to set aside money for the maintenance of it, and we need to have realistic expectations of what that maintenance will be and what the lifetime of these projects will be. Because right now when that is set aside it's never enough and it's always too optimistic. We need realistic projections of the lifetime cost of these constructions when we build them. We need money set aside for that. We need money in the budget from a federal level as well as local and state levels dedicated for infrastructure spending. Whether that means less money for defense spending, or something else, we have to set money aside for this right now, because if we don't, this is going to be such a humongous problem.
And it's ironic that the we started all this off to kick off this infinite growth, but now as these infrastructure costs catch up with us it's going to start being more and more of a drag on the system slowing that growth, slowing our GDP, which on a very large national scale creates that death spiral we talked about in those rural municipalities. As this starts impacting the economy, it becomes even harder to find money to repair this and it gets worse and worse, so we need to deal with this now rather than later if we want to have any chance of coming out of this, even remotely okay.
Daniel Forkner:
I think we can do it … (laughter) I don’t.
[34:01] Episodes like this are kind of hard to talk about because we're trying to point towards this very systemic and very broad range of things, and so much of this is interconnected and big that it's difficult to connect the dots on everything. But we want to kind of establish these concept so that we can later drill down into more specific things.
David Torcivia:
[34:18] Yeah so that means spending more time looking at this concrete or this stand conflict; digging into the road network and how that’s shaped everything; looking at the water systems of the country – these toxic waste sites, these superfund sites and things. Each one of these really deserves its own very detailed close look where you have a better understanding of just why they’re all such big problems, and maybe we’re doing a disservice by looking at it all at such a big scale and waving our hand saying “these things are bad, but we need an understanding before we can dig into this that all this stuff is interconnected, that these are parts of larger systemic issues, and once we understand that it becomes much easier for us to dig in and look at the actual real life scale of these problems and how they impact us in our day toay.
Daniel Forkner:
[35:04] We hope we're doing an okay job kind of outlining these broad concepts and we're really excited to drill down into more specific issues in upcoming shows.
David Torcivia:
[35:13] I know next week I'm really looking forward to our show which is something about the ocean to turn things back climate-related, and I'll just leave it at that but it's a very exciting episode something that we're both looking forward to sharing with all of ya’ll. If you want to find more information about the things we talked about today including links, journal articles, and more, you can find that information on ashesashes.org as well as a full transcript of this episode bye bye.
Daniel Forkner:
Once again, thanks for joining us, this is Ashes Ashes.
David Torcivia:
Bye.
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