Jacquelyn Martin/AP Photo
President Biden, with a bipartisan group of senators, spoke outside the White House earlier today after a meeting about the national infrastructure plan.
Republican and Democratic senators are talking infrastructure, and this time, unlike the talks led by West Virginia’s Shelley Moore Capito, or last month’s “Gang of 10” talks, or all four years of talks during the Trump presidency, it’s serious. As of Thursday morning, the newly chartered Gang of 21 had agreed to an infrastructure proposal, one that the White House also found palatable. “We have a deal,” said President Biden. “They have my word, I’ll stick with what we’ve proposed.”
What is the deal? The G-21 group (crucially, it has more Republicans than Democrats) has been hawking the package as a $1.2 trillion, eight-year bipartisan infrastructure plan, a number cosmetically inflated by all sorts of repackaged spending and sleights of hand to make the investment appear adequate to the need. The actually meaningful number is the $579 billion in new spending, according to recent reports, slightly higher than the $559 billion that had been floating around previously.
Of that half a trillion dollars, the vast majority is going, predictably, to repaving roads, expanding highways, building out airports, and burnishing other fossil fuel–heavy infrastructure, transportation, and land and water use patterns. There’s money, too, to revamp the fossil fuel–intensive parts of the energy grid: $79 billion is being bandied about as climate-related, going to electric cars and decarbonization of the entire American grid system nationwide and other nominally “green” activity. But broken out, it looks even less substantial. There’s just $15 billion for electric-vehicle infrastructure and electric buses and transit combined, along with $21 billion for “resilience,” $21 billion for environmental remediation that is pretty inarguably not climate-related, and $73 billion for power infrastructure, some percent of which presumably will be green.
Even at that generous $79 billion number, that means 14 percent of the infrastructure package is being dedicated to environmentally aligned projects, with electric cars and grid modernization, though those are the least ambitious parts of the environmental program—no major expansion of public transit, no major renewable-power generation programs. The other 86 percent of the package is largely going to expand fossil fuel–heavy infrastructure, including highways, ports, oil- and gas-reliant energy systems, and more (there’s money for water storage but no regulations on water use patterns).
Somehow, Biden and the senators are choosing to pursue the one method of doing infrastructure that would make the climate crisis worse.
This is how you arrive at an infrastructure package that’s actually an environmental net negative. Over six times as much money is being dedicated toward going backwards on the climate fight than going forward, not only wiping out whatever progress is being made by the $79 billion but sending us even further in the opposite direction. With a climate situation as dire as our current one, any spending on burnishing fossil fuel–reliant technology is indefensible. This is exactly how you get a deal that’s worse than no deal at all.
Ask anybody of any political persuasion and they’ll tell you immediately that America’s infrastructure sucks. They’ll likely be emphatic: It sucks! It’s been crumbling for decades, blighted by disinvestment and privatization and cost-cutting. It’s unmodernized to a nearly indescribable degree for a major, developed country. The American economy has basically been drawing dividends from infrastructure investment that ceased with the departure of President Lyndon Johnson in 1969.
That measure of disrepair, however, is an asset in the climate fight. So much of America's infrastructure needs so much investment that merely updating it to current standards would convert it to greener, climate-aligned technology. It would be more expensive to rebuild with lesser, fossil fuel–heavy technology. An infrastructure bill is an environmental bill by its very nature, as it deals with the country’s built environment, and the current thinking and technology for that built environment should create much more sustainable public works than the interstate highway system. It’s almost impossible to do this wrong.
And yet somehow, Biden and the senators are choosing to pursue the one method of doing infrastructure that would make the climate crisis worse, propping up freeways and oil- and gas-powered grids rather than building new, green infrastructure. Their deal is a half-step forward and multiple steps back, made worse by the fact that one of the mythical “pay-fors” is public-asset privatization, rebranded as “asset recycling.”
It’s worth taking a moment to appreciate the demise of ambition in President Biden’s proposals over the course of just a few short months. Biden initially proposed about $2.3 trillion in spending, invoking a broad notion of infrastructure to direct funding toward both broadband and providing care for children and the elderly. But the environmental commitment was arguably the biggest and most salient part of the package, with infrastructure presenting the easiest and most popular opportunity to begin enacting the sweeping environmental modernization the country so desperately needs. Those commitments came out of the Biden-Sanders working group and were something Biden campaigned upon explicitly.
Then the president and his aides began chipping away at their own proposal. The White House quickly cut the offer to about $1.7 trillion in a bid to win the Republican support that wasn’t needed and wasn’t coming, a gesture which won zero votes. Then down and down the number went until the $579 billion was arrived at, where the environmental commitments are basically absent.
Here are some caveats. To hear Democratic leaders in the White House and Congress tell it, that won’t be all the money spent—there will be another bill passed, chock-full of the other Democratic priorities. Whether congressional Democrats will be able to get their act together to push an even bigger partisan package through later on is far from clear, though the newly agreed-upon bill may be what the Intransigence Caucus of Manchin, Warner, and Sinema needed to get on board with that other stuff. We’ll see. Senate Budget Committee Chair Bernie Sanders has proposed an omnibus package of social, health care, and environmental spending totaling $6 trillion, and there’s a ton of pushback against the new agreement from Democratic senators not named Manchin and Sinema unless they can be sure that their much more ambitious and necessary priorities can be passed through reconciliation. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said she won’t even take up this new bill until a reconciliation bill full of other Democratic policy priorities, including climate, has been passed as well.
Whether or not Thursday’s deal becomes law, it’s still stunning to see the Biden White House, the self-proclaimed most climate-centric executive office ever elected, manage to divine the one way to do infrastructure spending that actually sets us even further back on climate. Even if a second bill is passed, it would have to undo or override the commitments of the first bill to become an environmental triumph. And given that the first bill pledges privatization, it will be even more difficult to enact that, as some of those infrastructure assets won’t even be publicly held. House progressives cheered the American Rescue Plan particularly because of the huge dollar amount that the legislation committed to public spending. On infrastructure, the Biden administration has now presented a package where the contents are so far from what needs to be done it’s impossible to even celebrate the dollar value.
It would be better to let the country’s crumbling, outmoded, fossil fuel–heavy infrastructure continue to fall into disrepair than to take a deal that would extend the life and use of calamitous land and water use patterns further. The $79 billion for electric-vehicle rollout and grid modernization will not even be enough to offset the impact of the rest of the package. As the entire American West scorches beneath another hellacious heat wave, and California suffers through an extreme drought, doing nothing would be better than enacting what’s currently on the table.
