The War on Infrastructure

About a year and a half ago, I wrote on this blog about Deb Chachra’s fabulous book How Infrastructure Works.

One of the key messages I got from that book – outside of the fact that Prof. Chachra loves to tour power plants and dams – was that infrastructure makes modern life possible. We have hot and cold running water in our houses. A flick of a switch gives us power.

Flick another one and you’re online, having a video chat with your friend on the other side of the world.

At the moment I’m reading another book – Carl Zimmer’s Air-Borne – and while that’s a book that discusses germ theory and contagious disease (indoor air quality is another passion of mine and you’ll hear more about this book another time), it made me realize something else: so much of the infrastructure we rely on is incredibly new.

In discussing some experiments that required collecting air samples high in the atmosphere by airplane, he mentioned Charles Lindbergh’s flights in the 1930s when he was scouting out routes for commercial airlines. Because in the early 1930s, we didn’t yet have commercial air traffic across the oceans.

I’m sure if you were born in the 21st century, 1930 seems like the dark ages. But there are still people around on this planet who were alive back then. It’s not very long ago.

We’ve become very accustomed to a lot of this infrastructure – including flying from continent to continent – in a short period of time.

We really don’t want to lose it. As Prof. Chachra points out:

We’ve created these collective infrastructural systems that make our lives, as we know them, possible. Any future with limited, reduced, or even more frequently interrupted access to them is recognizably worse than our present, if not downright dystopian.

She was speaking about climate change, which is already taking a toll on our infrastructure. It’s also been eroded due to poor maintenance over the years. In Oakland, where I live, a lot of water pipes are over a hundred years old because it was just over a hundred years ago that the water system was firmly put in place.

And while a hundred years isn’t a long time to have a municipal water system, it is a long time to rely on the original pipes.

But now we’re facing a third attack on our infrastructure, one that is causing much more immediate damage than even climate change and neglect. I refer to the chainsaw destruction of the federal government by the broligarch in chief and his grifter in the White House.

Infrastructure is more than pipes – though a lot of federal dollars do, in fact, go to fund water systems. Take, for example, the Federal Aviation Administration, which pulls together all the multiple parts that make air travel possible and safe.

This includes air traffic controllers as well as safety inspectors and the people who analyze every accident, even the minor ones, to learn what happened and how to prevent it.

We don’t have that intercontinental air traffic without this kind of system, but the Dodgy (DOGE) minions are running rampant through it. Add in that crash at National Airport a few weeks ago and all of a sudden a lot of people are very nervous about flying.

And given the plans being laid out – which include making a sweet deal for Elon Musk’s Starlink system, which hasn’t been vetted at all, to replace a new system from Verizon, which people have spent years developing – people have reason to be nervous.

I occasionally go up with my partner in a small plane (he’s part of a flying club) and listen to the air traffic controllers and the pilots. Their professionalism never ceases to astound me. There’s a whole system in place devoted to safe skies.

It’s less than a hundred years old (probably much less) and it makes air traffic possible.

(I mean, I wish we had the equivalent of air traffic control on our highways! Not to mention wishing drivers thought like pilots.)

I must admit that I was astounded that the forces of chaos would go after air travel systems, given that all the rich and important people in our country are constantly flying places. They may fly in private jets, but they use the same air traffic control system and rely on all the other pieces that make flying safe.

Why someone who flies all the time wants to weaken air safety is beyond me. But the omnishambles being created now apparently has no logic behind it except revenge on behalf of the grifter and the broligarch in chief or possibly opening doors for one of them to make more money.

It’s not just air safety. They recently came after the Weather Service and its parent agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). You know, the people who provide the data for all the weather reports, not to mention the hurricane, tornado, and blizzard warnings.

This is reportedly because they want to privatize these systems so someone can get rich off of them, but of course all the current private weather reporting companies rely on what they get from the Weather Service. NOAA supports an incredible amount of research, which is why weather predictions are now so reliable.

And everybody – including the airline industry – relies on it.

I have heard that they went after NOAA because someone contradicted the grifter back when he used a sharpie to inaccurately modify a hurricane prediction. The stupid is very deep here.

There is so much damage being done that’s it’s hard to keep a handle on it. I’m worried about the stealth cuts to Social Security built into closing offices and firing workers at an understaffed agency. I’m worried about Medicaid, which is paying for a majority of people in nursing homes today.

I’m appalled at the “war on woke,” which intends to destroy the civil rights so many people fought for so long and hard. Given the firings in the military in particular, it’s obviously racism and misogyny (and I include LGBTQ+ rights, particularly attacks on trans people, under misogyny).

But I wanted to focus on the damage to infrastructure as represented by the attacks on NOAA and the FAA in particular, because of what I learned from reading Prof. Chachra’s book. Living in a world with working infrastructure makes our lives comfortable and possible in a way that would have been unimaginable even a hundred years ago and would have sounded like pure fantasy two hundred years back.

The kind of chaotic cuts going on right now are going to make that infrastructure unreliable at best.

I’ll end with something else I came across this week, a newsletter called Conservation Works done by conservation and environmental reporer Michelle Nijhuis. https://conservationworks.substack.com/p/the-administrative-state-is-us

She writes:

The whole point of the civil service is to perform the functions that we, as a society, decide are both essential and impossible to undertake alone: disaster relief, mail delivery, highway construction, disease tracking, airline safety regulation — and protecting habitats, preventing extinctions, and restoring ecosystems.

Exactly.