#27 — Dragging feet across America.
Agencies with Jurisdiction, NIMBYs, and other impediments to getting things done.
Many Americans seem to feel that there is no need for a great rush to address climate change. And we tend to dismiss the United Nations as a group of whiners who always want the US to do more. But by all accounts the UN has amassed a truly impressive group of the world’s best minds on their Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. By their assessment, there is absolutely no time to lose, and the US does indeed need to do more because it is virtually unsurpassed in it’s per capita greenhouse gas emissions. It is also woefully behind schedule on the climate commitments it has already agreed to.
It’s not hard to see why China is so far ahead of the US in addressing global warming — while they claim to be communists, there was never a more earnest bunch of capitalists on the globe. President Xi doesn’t need to worry about the next election — what he says, goes. As the world’s factory, he knows that China must guarantee its energy future if they aim to keep cranking out all the stuff that the consumer economies hanker for. And he seems to understand that making the products we will need to address climate change — solar panels, electric cars & buses, wind turbines, and batteries — is going to be an excellent business model in the very near future.
Europe is way ahead of us too — how come? In spite of their more northerly latitude, they got the jump on us in per capita wind and solar production. Could it be that Europeans tend to have more faith in science? Or is it that their polititians are not so much in the pocket of the petroleum industry?
But I came across an interesting insight in Bloombergs that might hint at another reason the US is behind. Consider this: the first phase of the Second Avenue Subway in Manhattan cost $2.5 billion per mile, nearly five times the cost of a similar extension in Paris. In Portland, Oregon, a 7-mile light rail extension cost more than $200 million per mile, as much as a full subway system would cost in many European cities. When you start looking into all kinds of infrastructure improvements, the US tends to lead the world in costs, and in the time it takes to finish the job.
This does not bode well for Joe Biden’s 1.3 trillion public works plan. The extraordinary cost of infrastructure improvements causes two corollary problems: it means we tend to put them off (think potholes and failing bridges), and that dearth of projects means we have less depth on the expertise bench when we finally rouse ourselves. There are other problems, too!
Researchers at New York University’s Marron Institute of Urban Management have been looking into some reasons for our “less bang for more bucks” problem. Their conclusion: “It’s death by a thousand paper cuts.” Three areas stand out:
Project creep — adding to the size and scope of planned projects. Not only do the additions cost more, they require reopening design work that has already been done.
Poor project management — when these types of projects finally get approved, cities and states are reluctant to ramp up staff and expertise for oversight, making them easy targets for voracious contractors. Instead, management is often put into the hands of consultants who don’t have to answer to voters.
Soft costs — the process of wading through the phalanx of “Agencies with Jurisdiction”. Various government bureaucracies come to mind, but an even bigger problem can be the legions of Not-In-My-Backyarders.
For nearly a century the US has fostered the notion that citizen’s organizations should have the right to oppose projects they might not like. Most of this effort has gone into reinforcing racial segregation in housing through single family zoning, but it now spills over into anything that people think might not look nice, increase noise, change neighborhood character, reduce property values — the list goes on. The rise of NIMBY power has jacked up housing costs, favored highways over mass transit and aided in saddling our cities with a seemingly permanent homeless class. Now it stands in the way of addressing climate change.
We urgently need all the climate infrastructure included in the Biden plan, and a lot more. We need the biggest bang for the buck we can possibly get. We needed it yesterday, not a few years down the road.
Thanks for reading.
Doug Hylan, Brooklin, Maine
We are living on this planet as if we had another one to go to.” — Terri Swearingen