Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com

Biden’s “30 by 30”

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According to Yale Climate Connections, “30 by 30” is an ambitious plan to protect 30% of the USA’s land in a natural state by 2030. There is also a less ambitious part of the plan to protect 30% of the USA’s ocean area. I say the ocean part is less ambitious because, according to this article, 26% is already protected. And all you really have to do to protect the ocean (on paper) is draw a box on a map and pass a law saying that box is now protected.

The article refers to E.O. Wilson’s book Half Earth, which argues for protecting…I forget how much of the Earth, I am not good at math. But you get the idea. The moral and rhetorical case here is biodiversity-based, but it’s pretty clear that the practical case is carbon sequestration. There must be a cost-benefit calculation somewhere in there that this is the cheap way to make some progress on blunting the droughts, fires, floods, famines and abandoned coastal cities that are headed our way if we do nothing, and maybe even if we do something but not enough.

Land is different. This article says about 12% is now protected. So how would we actually get to 30? There must be 30% of land out there that is just not legally protected yet.

Achieving 30 by 30 will require action on numerous fronts. “A national program to enact 30 by 30 won’t just be a series of new national parks declared by the President, but will include things like national wildlife refuges, national monuments, state-level protected areas, conservation easements on private land, and co-management with tribal leadership,” wrote marine conservation biologist David Shiffman in Scientific American last October. “Local consultation and support will have to be part of it from the beginning, but it won’t be successful without support and leadership from the federal government.”

And it won’t be enough just to protect any land; it will matter significantly which 30 percent is protected. “Conserving a giant, undeveloped stretch of land where little lives and that no one wanted to develop anyway is not especially helpful to biodiversity conservation or climate resilience,” Shiffman wrote. At least some part of every major ecosystem needs to be protected, he wrote…

More than half of the country’s forests – critical carbon sinks, places that absorb more carbon dioxide than they release – are privately owned. U.C. Berkeley environmental science professors Arthur Middleton and Justin Brashares in the New York Times in December 2020 wrote that “private lands also connect our public lands, providing seasonal habitat for wide-ranging wildlife and clean drinking water, crop pollination, and flood control.” With about 12 percent of the privately land now meeting the 30 by 30 goals, they wrote, protecting the remaining 18 percent “means protecting an area more than twice the size of Texas.”

Yale Climate Connections

For this to be viable, it almost has to be easier than it sounds. I know large private forests are owned by university endowments and other wealthy institutional investors. They can either log them, or they can leave the trees in the ground to get more valuable until they log them later. Or they can sell them, or for all I know buy and sell complicated derivatives based on them. These investors are probably open to the idea of conservation easements which give them an additional payoff in return for agreeing not to develop (i.e. pave or build buildings) the land, which they are probably not interested in doing anyway. This is all speculation on my part.

There’s a lot of farmland out there that farmers would probably be happy to sell for reforestation (or restoration of grassland or wetland habitats) if the government were willing to pay. But I assume we need most of our cropland for growing crops, and taking cropland out of production doesn’t seem like a politically likely solution. Soil conservation is always good, but counting farms engaging in soil conservation practices as “protected natural land” would seem a bit sneaky. If that is what they are thinking, the 30% wouldn’t sound ambitious at all, it would just be a practical common-sense soil conservation program. Again, all speculation on my part. It will be interesting to hear more about this, and interesting to see if the administration can communicate it in a way that avoids conspiracy theories about the government coming for our sacrosanct private property.

war and peace

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I seem to have issues of war and peace on my mind this morning (I am writing on Saturday, February 27, 2021). USA Today has a nice piece of data journalism on U.S. troop deployments and war costs around the world. This seems to be based mostly on the Costs of War project at Brown University, but the USA Today maps and graphics are very clean and informative at a glance. As usual, I’m going to tell you not to read this post and go look at their graphics instead!

  • The U.S. military has engaged in ground combat in 8 countries since 2018 and conducted air strikes in 7 countries (some of these overlap, so it’s not 15 total). It has provided some form of training or assistance in 79 countries (again, overlapping). We have “up to” 800 military bases outside the U.S.
  • Over 800,000 people have died in U.S.-involved wars since 2001, and over 300,000 of these were civilians. U.S. military troops and contractors killed total about 15,000, with most of these in Iraq and Afghanistan (significantly more in Iraq). [We manage to get a lot of allies killed for every American killed, to get a lot of enemy fighters killed for every “friendly” soldier killed, and roughly speaking around one civilian killed for every soldier killed. Are these measures of efficiency? Not in any moral sense, in my view. The civilian death toll alone suggests to me that the idea of “humanitarian war” is an oxymoron, because the innocent people you are getting killed are supposedly the ones you are trying to help. If they were instead living under the iron heel of some mad government, the body count might be lower. This might be true of any war in history, in my view, which might be a somewhat controversial view. But I am not suggesting turning a blind eye, I am suggesting doing what we can to help people through non-violent means.]
  • The estimated cost of all this to the U.S. has been $6.4 trillion. About $130 billion of that was spent on diplomacy. The U.S. military budget (listed here as $731.8 billion dollars in 2019, but this must exclude a lot of intelligence, security, and nuclear spending outside the DOD), is equivalent to the military spending of the following countries in order of their spending: China, India, Russia, Saudi Arabia, France, Germany, UK, Japan, South Korea, and Brazil. [Even setting aside the moral travesties and death and destruction, are we getting good value for our tax money? Or is it more like our health care and “pandemic preparedness” systems, where we spend the most and get average to poor results? We certainly couldn’t beat the countries above if they ganged up on us in a straight-out fight, I don’t think.]

Speaking of countries ganging up, there is now a group of potential World War III allies called “the quad“: the United States, Japan, India, and Australia. On the other side would be China and…I’m not sure, maybe Pakistan? Japan is saying its military may start firing missiles at Chinese ships that enter disputed waters, which it has not done before.

And finally, in what will be very old non-breaking news by the time this posts, the U.S. has apparently dropped some bombs in Syria, a sovereign country it is not clear whether we are at war with or not. This seems to have something to do with the U.S. relationship with Iran, Saudi Arabia, UAE, and/or Israel. So our involvement in that unending regional proxy war grinds on at the same time we are rattling sabers at China and failing to tend to our significant problems at home.

sidewalk robots are legally pedestrians in some states

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Including, surprisingly, my state of Pennsylvania, which is rarely at the forefront of anything new. I am cautiously optimistic about this. It sounds like some pedestrian and bicycle advocates (I include myself in these groups) are against this. But I think slow-moving, light, predictable vehicles should not be a big problem. Fast, unpredictable vehicles driven by humans on infrastructure that does not consider the existence of pedestrians and bicyclists are what usually kills people. Also, every package on a slow, light, predictable robot is one that is not on a truck, and that should reduce the number of trucks over time. Trucks disproportionately kill people – pedestrians, bicyclists, and motorists alike. I realize that trucks also create some jobs, and job losses need to be dealt with through unemployment, education and training.

I see some problems looming, and these are infrastructure problems that need to be solved. Here in Philadelphia, sidewalks are often blocked by construction and parking because the law is either too lax or not enforced. Bike lanes often do not exist, and when they do they are often poorly designed, unprotected and unmaintained. Ramps for disabled people (which also help the rest of us, especially parents pushing strollers) often do not exist, are in a state of poor repair, collect water every time it rains, or are simply blocked by, again, construction or illegal parking. These are design and operational problems that have solutions, and the relevant public agencies (more than one, but one in particular) are either ignorant or incompetent or both. We need to fix the public agencies before we can design streets, bike lanes and sidewalks that are really going to work.

There’s another issue here. I don’t have the time, money, or expertise to sue individual contractors, landowners, or public agencies because they are blocking my walking path or bicycling lane. An Amazon or a UPS or a Google or an Uber will have these resources. This might be okay if it forces some change on big entities with deep pockets. This could be a problem for the individual homeowner or small business owner though. In my city, technically the sidewalk in front of my house is private property but public right-of-way. That means I can’t stop people from walking past, I can’t modify it significantly, but I can be sued or forced to repair it if it is not up to code. This might make sense on paper, but in practice cities are very lenient enforcing this on the small-time homeowner unless there is a serious incident. Sticking every homeowner in a city with a $10,000 repair bill (you might as well replace water and sewer lines while you are at it, which many people also don’t realize they own and are responsible for) would be a big burden on the middle class on down. Sidewalks are obviously public infrastructure and really part of the street, but this is one way cities push responsibilities and costs to the citizenry and try to keep taxes down a little bit. Taking over the sidewalks and raising enough tax revenue to keep them in a state of good repair would probably be the best answer from a technical and economic standpoint, but this would be a big legal and financial change for city government.

My utopian vision is for walking, bicycling, and slow, predictable, light, soft rounded vehicles to gradually displace most of the trucks, taxis and private cars that are out there. There would be less traffic at this point, almost no need for parking because the vehicles can just stack themselves somewhere out of the way when they are not in use. Maybe you only need one travel lane for big vehicles at this point (we’ll still want ambulances and fire trucks, although really I think these can be a bit smaller and quieter and still do the job), and robots, bicycles, and pedestrians can all have their own dedicated spaces and signals. You would have lots of room opened up for green infrastructure, sidewalk cafes, park benches, fountains, or whatever else you want to do. There is no technical or economic reason it couldn’t be done, and it would be cool. Cynicism, ignorance, and poor leadership are the reasons it won’t be done, at least not in most U.S. cities anytime soon.

more free time at home = more babies?

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The answer is no. Early in the pandemic, I heard people suggesting that having healthy young couples home more with time on their hands would result in a baby boom. The data show that the opposite is true. On aggregate, people actually make somewhat rational economic decisions about having children. When times are uncertain, a fraction of people decide to postpone plans they might have had to have children, and a certain fraction of those people either miss their window or just change their minds. This shows up in the data.

The article acknowledges that immigration is a potential answer to this. But it is difficult politically, and even if you can convince your population that it is a good idea, you need a good plan to make sure the immigrants can make a positive economic contribution, and you need a plan to ease them into your culture. This doesn’t mean erasing their culture, religion, or language, of course, but nor do you want your culture, religion, or language to change massively in a short time or your country may lose its sense of national identity. Having a sense of national identity while still being relatively trusting and tolerant is a balancing act, and my thought is that you want to allow change but try to make it slow and gradual. Maybe we need a Federal Reserve of Cultural Change to manage this rate.

As a working parent, I also recognize that spending more time at home does not mean more free time for everyone. Working from home full time and taking care of young children who are also home all the time, with no babysitters or minimal support from grandparents and extended family, has been very difficult for many people, including yours truly. If you are not in this situation, those of us who are may chafe a bit when you tell us how “bored” you are. But I also recognize there have been no happy mediums, with part of the population stressed out of their minds and half bored out of their minds, and some of the people who are bored (like grandparents) wishing they could help more but unable to.

diversity and resilience

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Here is an example from economics and urban planning of how a diverse system can be a resilient system.

At its peak in 1950, the Coca-Cola bottling plant in Indianapolis employed 250 workers and turned out two million fizz-filled bottles of Coke a week. Now, it is home to the Bottleworks Hotel, the center of a mixed-use development that opened in late 2020 with the hopes of rejuvenating a neighborhood.

The developer of the site, Hendricks Commercial Properties, said the pandemic had shown the value of diversification as a bulwark against shorter building life spans. No one could have predicted that a havoc-wreaking pandemic would make gathering places so unappealing, at least in the short term. But by having a mix of offices, retail, hotel and other uses, the risk for Hendricks is spread out. The Bottleworks development has an eight-screen movie theater, for instance, but also a tech incubator.

New York Times

This is not really the main point of the article, but I think a useful lesson to learn from the pandemic is that mixed-use neighborhoods where people can live, work, shop, study, and recreate seem to have been more resilient. I don’t have data to back this up, and it should be studied, but it is pretty obvious that the central business district in my city has been hard hit. Very few people live there. The office towers normally fill up each morning with thousands (tens or hundreds of thousands?) of suburban train and car commuters. Restaurants and other services are full of these people on weekdays and often close early on weekday evenings and sometimes are closed on the weekend. Hotels and other businesses that are open in the evening serve business travelers, convention goers, and tourists. There is some shopping, but more luxury goods aimed at these tourists and convention goers rather than basic grocery and household goods. So take away the office workers, business travelers, convention goers, and tourists, and the place is empty. Businesses are devastated. Financially, the city depends on wage, sales, and business tax revenues from the central business district to fund its services throughout the rest of the city. So getting more people to live within walking distance of downtown, and having more “normal” businesses that serve normal people there, could make it more resilient.

The same principle applies to natural ecosystems and agricultural systems too. Diversity might make a system a bit less efficient in terms of production, but you have a variety of organisms waiting in the wings to step in and fill functions if a dominant species that used to fill those functions is lost due to disease, disaster or environmental change (or combinations of these.)

I am thinking about this as I read a book called What’s So Good About Biodiversity by Donald Maier. The author has some reasonable points about biologists using the term biodiversity as a sort of lazy shorthand for ecosystem function or specific benefits. But overall, I find the author to someone without an ounce of understanding of how systems function. He literally can’t see the forest for the trees. He also seems to be a person with zero emotional connection to nature, which I find sad and abnormal. I’m going to call him a biopath – like a psychopath, a person who does not have normal emotions toward other people and is not really aware of what those emotions would feel like. I think there is a normal range of strength of emotion people feel about nature, and I accept that for some people the feelings are not all that strong compared to their feelings about, say, constructed environments or manufactured goods. But to feel nothing is not normal, and the 500 pages of verbal diarrhea in Mr. Maier’s book do not make it any more normal. (I haven’t finished the book – perhaps it will get better towards the end, when Mr. Maier promises to explain what “better reasoning about nature’s value” would look like. If the book has a fantastic ending, I promise to come back and sing its praises in this blog.)

February 2021 in Review

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Most frightening and/or depressing story: For people who just don’t care that much about plants and animals, the elevator pitch on climate change is it is coming for our houses and it is coming for our food and water.

Most hopeful story: It is possible that mRNA technology could cure or prevent herpes, malaria, flu, sickle cell anemia, cancer HIV, Zika and Ebola (and obviously coronavirus). With flu and coronavirus, it may become possible to design a single shot that would protect against thousands of strains. It could also be used for nefarious purposes, and to protect against that are ideas about what a biological threat surveillance system could look like.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: At least one serious scientist is arguing that Oumuamua was only the tip of an iceberg of extraterrestrial objects we should expect to see going forward.

what would a forward-looking infrastructure plan look like?

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The U.S. has neglected its infrastructure for decades and is falling apart. Unemployment and inequality are high, and people are hurting. Real interest rates are negative, there is virtually no risk of inflation, and the U.S. dollar remains strong and stable for the near future. Warm up the printing presses and helicopters! Don’t take it from me, take it from Larry Summers, who is normally in the headlines for cautioning against this sort of thing:

we propose a crude way to take account of this by excluding a specific set of programs and investments from the constraints of pay-as-you-go when strong evidence from academic research implies they would plausibly pay for themselves in present value. This includes well-designed investments in areas like children, education, and research. Infrastructure would ideally be paid for with Pigouvian revenue measures that improve infrastructure utilization, but it too could get an exception to the pay-as-you-go principle.

a paper by Larry Summers and another guy you haven’t heard of

Under these conditions, just directing the fire hose of federal money at infrastructure projects, any infrastructure projects, can’t hurt. It might be good to do that rather than spend too much time coming up with a plan to do it the best possible way. And yet, it could be done better. We could take the time to plan when we are not in a crisis, and then be ready to turn on the taps when a crisis hits (or just crack the taps open to a slow drip when a minor challenge hits and we need to nudge the country back on course.)

Too many proposals about infrastructure just boil down to throwing money at pork barrel highway projects, or else a buzzword soup about things like sustainability and equity without specific proposals. Here is one new proposal from Rice University with some specifics. One thing they propose is that project proposals come from leaders at the metropolitan or regional scale rather than the federal government. I completely agree with this. They suggest focusing on transportation (including public transportation), public facilities (including health facilities and parks), water and wastewater, energy (including renewables), and communications (including broadband). They then get down to a laundry list of specific projects at the local scale that would benefit from funding. Pulling all of this together is a pretty good accomplishment.

These basic categories sound okay to me. I might leave “health facilities” out of it – the U.S. needs a comprehensive, universal health care system now and that is a big enough topic to deserve its own legislation and program. Education is similar. I might add housing. Housing is a huge topic and it is excluded from most definitions of public infrastructure, but it is so intertwined with infrastructure and land use that its problems almost need to be solved at the same time. I like that they included parks – I might broaden this to include other forms of green infrastructure like street trees. Maybe “green infrastructure” is a too buzzwordy term – nothing wrong with “parks and trees”, except maybe there is a gray area whether are talking about any type of park or recreation facility (an urban playground or basketball court?) or whether it has to be quasi-naturalistic. I think I would go with the broader definition. I might add “urban food infrastructure” to the list – this is somewhat nebulous, but again intertwined with the larger infrastructure system and land use issues. You don’t really want the ag industry lobbyists involved, hence the “urban” term.

A bunch of projects do not make a plan. A good plan needs to have a definition of the system that is being planned for, and measurable goals for the state or function of that system that is desired. Then any package of inter-related projects can be evaluated to see how well they meet the goals and at what cost. Then finally, a specific package of projects can be chosen and put in priority order, and funding and implementation details can be worked out. Lots of “plans” skip right to the last step I just mentioned, while others fail because the last two steps are not well enough thought out.

As far as goals, they should be set at the local level, but the basics are fairly obvious, I think:

  • Provide reliable and affordable water, energy, communication, food and waste disposal services for everyone. (This can get wonkier – you want to keep infrastructure in a state of good repair, set and meet level of service goals, and minimize the cost of each component over its life cycle by making smart maintain/repair/replace/upgrade decisions.)
  • Minimize the expense and time of moving people and goods where they need to go. (I think of this as infrastructure minimizing “friction” in the workings of the economy.)
  • Minimize the negative impacts and maximize the positive impacts of the infrastructure system on the environment and public health, or if we want to be more buzzwordy, maximize ecosystem services.
  • Make the transportation system as safe as possible for everyone. (You could roll this into either the transportation or health goals, but it is so near and dear to my heart I give it its own bullet. If we made this an explicit goal, we would not be designing our streets and highways the way we are today in the U.S. By the way, active commutes are very nice and a lot of people might like them if they had the option to give them a try.)
  • Housing – I don’t know enough to articulate this. Basically, everybody needs to be able to afford a decent roof over their heads.
  • Be prepared to react, manage, and recover from disasters and other disruptions that occur. The buzzword is resilience. (Climate change mostly fits under this goal. The words “climate change” are not a goal or a plan in and of themselves. Some bad things that happen are related to climate change, and some are just random bad luck, and some are mixes of the two. We need to be ready for all of them.)

A few more principles I think are important:

  • The federal government could fund this planning at the metro scale. The planning itself would create some government, professional, and academic jobs and build technical capacity. Something similar is already done for transportation so it could be expanded. The plan would need to be on the books, with a goal-based analysis justifying a prioritized list of specific projects selected, to be eligible for federal funding.
  • The funding should go from the federal government directly to metro areas, without passing through state politicians. Otherwise they will use the helicopters to scatter the money over rural areas where it will not do as much economic good or help as many people. States could be given a fair amount of money to plan and implement in areas unable or uninterested in doing it themselves.
  • The metro region needs to have skin in the game. The federal government should match local investments – it could match at a higher or lower rate depending on economic conditions, but something short of 100%.
  • Funding for maintenance needs to be included, and set aside in some sort of trust fund. This would need to include funding for existing infrastructure through the end of its service life, and then funding for new infrastructure to be maintained as it replaces the old. In fact, funding maintenance of existing infrastructure would be the single easiest way to benefit people and the economy right away without the considerable time and effort it takes to get new construction projects up and running. Maybe I’ll rethink my earlier proposal to leave out education, and include maintenance of public schools which would instantly improve the lives of millions of children, parents, teachers and staff. We could hit this hard and have a decent public school system in this country (again) by fall 2021.

So there’s my infrastructure plan. If you are a powerful politician reading this, please feel free to steal it and say you thought of it. My reward will be living in a decent, modern country with a growing economy and a pleasant environment.

how much working from home is the right amount?

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1-2 days a week is a sweet spot, according to human resources guidelines and some actual research.

long-run effects of telecommuting are all described by bell-shaped curves: Telecommuting first increases skilled and unskilled workers’ productivity and GDP up to some threshold. Beyond that level, a higher share of home-workers reduces the strength of the knowledge and information spillovers which, therefore, do not produce desirable effects. Too much WFH may thus be detrimental to long-run innovation and growth due to limitations of information and communication technologies as well as foregone agglomeration economies in the form of face-to-face contact and knowledge spillovers.2 Figure 1 illustrates this point via some back-of-the-envelope computations using consensus parameter values. The WFH share that maximizes GDP varies between 20% and 40% in our simulations – one or two working days per 5-day week. This is broadly in line with recommendations made in human resource management (Gajendran and Harrison 2007).

Vox

It wasn’t exactly clear to me whether the model mentioned here distinguished between the share of people work from home and the share of an individual’s work days that would be at home. That may not matter to a mathematical model, but it obviously matters to an individual.

1-2 days sounds about right to me. It’s enough to get the personal collaboration and interaction, which is important both for innovation and psychological reasons. Just having a change of scenery a couple days a week is important for psychological reasons too. That 1-2 days at home does cut down on all that wasted time and pollution caused by typical car commutes. This wouldn’t have to be the case if more people lived in communities where they could have active commutes (walking or biking), because the commute then provides some fresh air, exercise, a change of scenery, and sometimes a little social interaction. Sometimes its nice to stop at a coffee shop on the way in, and sit on a park bench for a few minutes or enjoy an…er…adult beverage on the way home (with no possibility of drunk driving, although angry car commuters can be a danger to mildly inebriated pedestrian. I’ve also noticed that car commuters seem particularly angry on Friday afternoons, while walking commuters seem particularly happy. Why is that? Because the walking commuter’s weekend has started and the car commuter’s psychological weekend doesn’t start until the car is in the garage, and in between that moment and the moment they are in are many forces outside their control.) It helps to have “third places” to unwind a bit between work and home. This is a major reason I live where I do, and one thing I have really missed during the pandemic. (Another thing I have missed is my children to and from school, parks, playgrounds, museums, etc.) Over the past year, the headaches of city living have outweighed the benefits I had taken for granted before that.

A couple more thoughts on working from home:

  • Obviously, some kinds of jobs can do it more than others. The kind that can tend to be higher paying. I think we have all learned something over the past year about “essential workers”, which actually means essential jobs done by expendable workers. Here’s a crazy idea – people who volunteer to do dangerous jobs like deep sea diving and drilling for oil in war zones get hazard pay to make it worth their while. It should be possible to have a government program that supplements the pay of ordinary people doing ordinary jobs under emergency conditions.
  • Co-working seems to me to hold some promise as a compromise between working in a corporate office and working from home. You get a professional atmosphere, a bit of breathing room between work and home (which let’s be honest, your family members may appreciate as much as you do), and you can significantly cut down on your commute – ideally, your co-working site should be accessible on foot, by 100% safe protected bike lane, or in a pinch by public transportation. Over time, this could allow your employer to downsize the office if that is what they want to do, without transferring 100% of the burden of operating an inefficient and far from ideal professional office to each individual worker in their family home. Some employers may have concerns about confidentiality, but outside high-security industries this should be manageable through things like sound-proof booths in the co-working sites.
  • Finally, my observation among professional workers is that some people and some specific jobs are better suited to it than others. I have noticed that the same people who struggled with communication in the office (for a variety of reasons – language barrier, personality type, or just being young and not having figured it out yet) are the ones who have been left behind in the co-working world. If those people are otherwise valuable, employers need to figure out how to bring them along through mentoring, training, carrots and/or sticks of some sort or they won’t realize the career potential they otherwise could have.

Joe Biden has a mangy dog

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I was having kind of a rough morning, and then this made me laugh out loud! Of course, the “panel of presidential historians” is being completely deadpan, if not actually serious. I did not independently verify that this is an actual picture of Joe Biden’s actual dog at the actual White House. If so, it does seem like they could afford to get a dog groomer in there. Then again, maybe it fits the image that an “average Joe” would have an average dog. And the dog looks perfectly happy to me, like it’s lying on a porch looking out over the Smoky Mountains with someone strumming a banjo in the background.

Twitter

fun stats on U.S. blackouts

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Electric blackouts are yet another area where the hard data shows the U.S. is slipping behind other developed countries.

To put it bluntly, this kind of situation doesn’t happen everywhere. In fact, it happens more often in the U.S. than in any other developed country, according to the University of Minnesota’s Massoud Amin, a founding expert in smart-grid technology. Amin has found that utility customers lose power for an average of 4 minutes annually in Japan, compared to 92 minutes per year in the Upper Midwest.

“We are behind all other G7 nations in our infrastructure, including the power grid,” Amin said.

Yale Climate Connections

One simple (i.e. low tech but expensive) solution suggested is to bury power lines, which provides protection against both storms and freezing. I have always thought it would make sense to put utility tunnels under roads and streets. Then you could put all your utilities in there (electric, gas, water, sewer, communications) and have access to them through manholes rather than having to dig up the street. Of course, this would require up front planning and expense, it might be hard to retrofit an existing city this way, and it would require coordinating the patchwork of mostly uncoordinated public and private entities that fund and operate our infrastructure systems. Or we could try to untangle that patchwork into something that makes more sense.

We’ll need to figure something out just to keep the system functioning as it ages. At the same time, extreme weather and other disasters seem to be getting worse. There is talk of electrifying vehicles on a large scale, and some locales are shifting away from natural gas and toward electrifying more homes and businesses. Then we have the move toward more decentralized, intermittent sources of energy. And finally, there is the risk of cyber attacks and plain old fashioned attacks, whether by a serious foreign adversary or just mischief makers. Right now, foreign adversaries and mischief makers may just be sitting back and laughing at the United States as we manage to spread deadly biological agents and let our critical infrastructure fail from neglect without their help.