An America Flush with Infrastructure: Why They're ALL "Bridges to Nowhere"

In the stampede to bring new infrastructure 'investment' programs onto the agenda of the incoming Obama Administration, Progressives are in the process of being seriously rolled by the Old Left, and some tragic public policy mistakes seem about to be made as a consequence. A chorus of calls for new "make work" spending on "Roads & Bridges" (led, behind the scenes, by the multinational Civil Engineering contractors who stand most to benefit), neglects obvioius facts of the 21st Century, as if this were the 1976 Transition that's upon us.

NOT THE CARS, BUT THE WASTE

Despite decades of exhortation to the better angels of our nature, automobile drivers do not park their cars to 'walk, bike, or take mass transit' in order to conserve energy, avert greenhouse gas emissions, or otherwise Save the Planet. Even high gas prices have little impact on the traffic volume of the average daily commute. Drivers, in any significant numbers, park their cars and choose other forms of transportation because of traffic congestion and its attendant delays, frustration, and inconvenience, and for no other reason. Building more roads and bridges - best justified to alleviate such congestion - merely encourages "Car Culture", at precisely the time when both the Global Climate and National Security demand exactly the opposite. The cumulative impact of any sizeable improvements in road transportation infrastructure in the United States will be tens of millions of additional passenger vehicle miles driven annually, each year thereafter, than would otherwise have been the case. The simple fact is that you can either invest infrastructure dollars in projects which combat Global Warming and reduce our Dependence on Foreign Oil, OR you can build Roads & Bridges; you cannot do both, as these are mutually exclusive objectives.

Curiously, lost beneath the Roads & Bridges hype [paid for by the likes of Halliburton, Brown & Root, CH2M Hill, BRPH, PBS&J, etc.,] is America's dirty little infrastructure secret: that our 'dirty infrastructure' - specifically Sewage ("wastewater") and Garbage ("solid waste") facilities are in far worse shape than the road transportation network, require more serious overhaul, would employ far more people for a much longer period to upgrade, and represent truly legitimate 'investments', complete with a financial return to the taxpayers and other parties who fund the transformation necessary.

Together with municipal Water production and treatment facilities, the Sewage and Garbage systems in use virtually throughout the United States are of woefully inadequate capacity and badly in need of structural maintenance; moreoveer, they invariably rely upon archaic, obsolete technologies originated in the 19th Century, at the dawn of public sanitation, with little substantive advancement since then. Outdated methodologies for the production of clean water and the disposal of wastes threaten our environment in numerous ways, from the destruction of watersheds and wildlife habitat to stormwater runoff and the poisoning of maine ecosystems, but the most serious impacts are in the form of Greenhouse Gas emissions. The decomposition of America's Sewage and Garbage releases billions of cubic feet of Methane into the atmosphere each year; being between 20x and 70x as potent a GHG as Carbon Dioxide, this makes our waste managment infrastructure one of the world's largest contributors to anthropogenic Climate Change. Of course, this does not account for toxic leachate into the water table from so-called 'sanitary' landfills, or the cascading effects of eutrophication in our waterways from sewage effluent over-fertillizing estuarine flora.

Nationiwide, more than 250 Billion tons of Garbage and Sewage are produced each year. A variety of modern technologies, including Wet Thermal Oxidation/Supercritical Water Oxidation (producing Syncrude), Exothermic Plasma Synthesis (producing Syngas), and others, have been commercially demonstrated to cleanly convert these wastes into energy, on an economical - even, dare we say it, 'profitable' - basis. Today, many methods of processing fecal sludge, cellulosic, and polymeric wastes into alcohol, biodiesel, and even directly into gasoline have been demonstrated. Every pound of Garbage that isnt landfilled and every gallon of Sewage that isnt 'treated', but are instead converted to fuels and electricity, provide Carbon-neutral energy to the nation instead of Greenhouse pollution to the atmosphere. At the systems level, its a strongly Carbon Negative approach to environmental energy production, of the sort that any technologically sophisticated civilization [1] should have adopted long ago as a matter of course.

Twenty years ago, this writer was impressed that archeologists had identified the ancient presence of the Ayce Indians in Central Florida, by discovering the "kitchen middens" left behind by these pre-historic peoples, some 5,000 years earlier. Their solution to the disposal of wastes was to pile it up into a heap, and let it rot. Fifty Centuries later, the bulldozers of Melbourne's putrid 'sanitary' landfill were perpetually engaged in the same technology, but with diesel engines roaring to accomplish it to boot. Meanwhile, a few moments drive to the east, the Indian River Lagoon was being turned into a giant 'dead zone', with marine life suffocated by the vast quantities of Sewage effluent discharged into it on a daily basis. Twenty years later, nothing has changed, only the quantities have increased with a growing population. It is the same story in nearly every city and county in the United States.

Nearly everywhere, municipal and county governments face daunting financial challenges in trying to expand Water, Sewage, and Garbage capacity to meet rising demand due to population growth, let alone any improvements in the level of technology employed, or deferred maintenance on existing facilities. Many local governments are at or near statutory limits on their bonded indebtedness; landfill space is rapidly running out, nobody wants a smelly old landfill or sewage plant in their communities, and transporting wastes ever greater distances (remember New York's infamous "Garbage Barge"?) makes less and less sense as the fuel and climate costs of doing so escalate. Recently, Honolulu made arrangements to ship 500,000 tons of Garbage to the U.S. mainland each year, for landfilling in the Pacific Northwest. Where is the Love?

An intelligent Infrastructure Initiative of the Obama Administration would eschew the 'Roads & Bridges' corporate welfare to the Civil Engineering conglomerates, and would instead "bank" the financing to underwrite every municipal/county public works agency in the United States to enter into Public/Private Partnerships with Investor Owner/Operators to replace all Garbage and Sewage infrastructure with 'Zero Emission/Zero Effluent' 100% energy recovery systems, within 10 years. Among a dozen or so major third-generation Waste-to-Energy technology options that have now been proven, domestic American emerging growth, high technology ventures are now at the forefront. This is the heart of the Green Industrial Revolution, so often mentioned yet so little discussed. Once constructed, such advanced Waste-to-Energy facilities will continue to generate net positive revenue for their participating municipal partners on a perpetual basis, instead of being a permanent drag on local finances, as old-fashioned waste management used to be, the way they did things back in the primitive 20th Century.

Spend those infrastructure dollars to build our green energy technology base, not to perpetuate 20th Century "car culture". BAN the practice of landfilling, and the discharge of ANY wastewater effluent, and prohibit ALL atmospheric emissions from ALL municipal waste management facilities nationwide within a decade. Only after we begin to reconceptualize our secret dirty waste streams as valuable - and clean - energy feedstocks, will we have the chance to make real progress on Climate Change and Energy Independence.

It must also be mentioned that declining mountain snow melt, a casualty of Climate Change, is already diminishing many of the nation's most important rivers, and reservoirs which are the source of many cities' drinking water. Major metropolitan areas, including Las Vegas, Phoenix, Tucson, and Albuquerque, now face the very real prospect of becoming uninhabitable in ten years due to catastrophic drought. Unless major seawater pipeline and solar desalination projects are brought online during the interim, tens of millions of Americans will become 'water refugees' right here in North America. There is a strong case to be made that massive seawater pipelines, running deep inland - with solar desalination executed in discrete increments along their rights-of-way - will be to 21st Century commerce what the Interstate Highways were in the 20th Century, and the Railroads were in the 19th. Such infrastructure projects would be on a massive, geoengineering scale, and require many years to complete; unfortunately, the drought will arrive in a decade, predictably, whether such pipelines have been constructed in the mean time, or not.

'MAKE WORK' vs. 'MAKE GREEN'

Given the environmental and economic benefits of rebuilding our Sewage/Garbage infrastructure using contemporary technologies, and the catastrophic disaster which awaits us if we neglect to deliver new sources of clean, fresh Water to our fastest growing population centers, it would be astonishing for the new Administration to focus its Infrastructure policy on laying asphalt for ill-conceived transportation projects which are outmoded before they are even undertaken. When the environmental issues specific to asphalt and cement processing are also taken into account, no Progressive can defend in good conscience a "Roads & Bridges" infrastructure program. With vast sources of avoidable GHG pollution and equally vast sources of new clean fuels and electricity in the balance, an "Environmental Energy & Water" infrastructure focus is the only credible approach that President Obama and the new Congress should consider.