Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer also had a press conference March 25, and promised a large ["go bold!,” fist pumps, etc.] infrastructure bill “when Congress reconvenes in April.” Schumer was more explicit than President Biden about a $1.5 trillion “Build Back Better” bill, saying “Climate change is the priority” in the bill. He added a lie, “I think the American people know we have to do infrastructure in a new `green’ way.”
In fact there is nothing new about doing infrastructure in a “green way”; it is the entire characteristic of the past 20 years. Nor is it true, as “experts” and Members of Congress continually repeat, that “We never invest in infrastructure.”
Between 2010 and 2020, $300 billion has been invested in the United States in constructing wind and solar electric power capacity. Between 2000 and 2020, $340 billion has been invested in constructing gas turbine electric capacity. The combined roughly $50 billion/year invested in these power sources in the past decade is one-fourth of all infrastructure investment of all kinds, at all levels of government and privately, in that period; and this particular power infrastructure represents by far the largest infrastructure investment made. Some 170 GW rated (not performing) capacity of wind and solar were added in the past decade, 16% of U.S. installed electric capacity. And 340 GW of gas turbine electric power were added in two decades, 31% of all U.S. electric capacity. Solar and wind capacity quadrupled in a decade while coal was cut in half, nuclear was reduced by 9%.
This is the power infrastructure – wind and solar power backed up by natural gas turbine plants – which has spread rapidly across the United States in this century due to very large investments, indeed; and it is the power infrastructure which failed in California in Summer 2019 and Summer 2020, and then failed disastrously in Texas in February 2021, costing more than 40 lives. It has also excluded other major infrastructure investment, leading to other disasters like the month-and-counting without water for the 165,000 people of Jackson, Mississippi.
The “new, green” infrastructure is cheap, interruptible, unreliable; and it is pushing more expensive, durable, reliable power out of the U.S. market, with the help of the “Enron” electricity deregulation wave of 1999-2005.
Infrastructure that accordingly did not get built during that period included: storm gates and walls and levees for hurricane and flood protection; water management systems and waterway improvements like TVA; desalination plants for Western and Southwestern drought; drinking water systems replaced; 500,000 more acute hospital beds which were and are still needed; electrified rail systems, tunnels and bridges; airports. Investments accordingly not made included billions into fusion and plasma technologies and NASA’s Moon-Mars mission.
