And the climatistas believe we're going to have a whole new solar/wind energy infrastructure by 2035? Maybe 2135, but that's long time to move about in donkey carts and shoe leather
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Broken dreams
… Part of the reason [why building anything, but especially infrastructure, in the United States costs so much and takes so long.] is just plain waste and corruption. The federal infrastructure bill has created massive incentives for rent-seeking while ballooning the municipal lobbying sector. Like contestants on a game show, states and localities are scrambling for dollars, correctly understanding that this might be the only major windfall in this area for a decade or more—again, largely due to Congress' inability to do its job in a predictable way in concert with a chief executive who can set clear achievable policy priorities.
… [W]hile some of the cost is inputs, such as material and labor, they don't explain the disparity fully. A recent study of the interstate highway system from George Washington University professor Leah Brooks and Yale University professor Zachary Liscow suggests that the X-factor is "citizen voice," which can take the form of legitimate opposition to eminent domain, or which might be less charitably described as "not in my backyard" obstructionism and environmental regulatory foot dragging.
…This is hardly a new problem. Eli Dourado, a policy analyst at the Center for Growth and Opportunity at Utah State, told The Week that infrastructure projects funded by then-President Barack Obama's 2009 stimulus were subject to nearly 200,000 environmental reviews.
And these regulations hamper all projects, not just classic bridge, road, and rail spending. The infrastructure bill actually cleared the way for companies building high-speed vacuum-based hyperloop tunnel projects to become eligible for federal funding, creating a Non-Traditional and Emerging Transportation Technology Council at the Department of Transportation to "support the safe deployment of the transportation system." While that might sound like an encouraging development for those who are excited about innovations in transportation, anyone who knows how the process really works will find the regulatory jargon above ominous, to say the least.
In this, as in so many other sectors distorted by government spending and regulation, the best hope may lie outside of traditional answers. Perhaps jetpacks will let us skip over the decaying bridges.
Infrastructure is broadly considered one of the least controversial functions of government, just as budgeting is one of the most basic functions of Congress. The messy fate of Biden's long-awaited bipartisan bill is a reminder that the federal government is so far from getting even these fundamentals right that it certainly shouldn't be trusted with higher-order functions, and that all of us should be thinking about ways to work around state dysfunction given our limited prospects for improving the current expensive, broken system.
As Biden so happily points out, Ford has already diverted $11 billion to develop new electric cars, money that otherwise would have gone towards R&D and manufacture of conventional cars and trucks. Multiply that by the similar sums being spent by all the other car manufacturers, add in the billions and billions of dollars that oil companies have diverted from exploring for new oil sources, and we’re going to end up in 2035 with a fleet of cars that won’t go, and factories that can’t run. I foresee difficulties with that scenario.
