{"id":3885,"date":"2025-03-07T02:00:40","date_gmt":"2025-03-07T10:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/?p=3885"},"modified":"2025-03-06T11:53:27","modified_gmt":"2025-03-06T19:53:27","slug":"the-war-on-infrastructure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/2025\/03\/07\/the-war-on-infrastructure\/","title":{"rendered":"The War on Infrastructure"},"content":{"rendered":"

About a year and a half ago, I wrote on this blog about Deb Chachra\u2019s fabulous book How Infrastructure Works<\/i>.<\/a><\/p>\n

One of the key messages I got from that book \u2013 outside of the fact that Prof. Chachra loves to tour power plants and dams \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

Flick another one and you\u2019re online, having a video chat with your friend on the other side of the world.<\/p>\n

At the moment I\u2019m reading another book \u2013 Carl Zimmer\u2019s Air-Borne<\/em><\/a> \u2013 and while that\u2019s a book that discusses germ theory and contagious disease (indoor air quality is another passion of mine and you\u2019ll hear more about this book another time), it made me realize something else: so much of the infrastructure we rely on is incredibly new.<\/p>\n

In discussing some experiments that required collecting air samples high in the atmosphere by airplane, he mentioned Charles Lindbergh\u2019s flights in the 1930s when he was scouting out routes for commercial airlines. Because in the early 1930s, we didn\u2019t yet have commercial air traffic across the oceans.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m 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\u2019s not very long ago.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve become very accustomed to a lot of this infrastructure \u2013 including flying from continent to continent \u2013 in a short period of time.<\/p>\n

We really don\u2019t want to lose it. As Prof. Chachra points out:<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

She was speaking about climate change, which is already taking a toll on our infrastructure. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

And while a hundred years isn\u2019t a long time to have a municipal water system, it is a long time to rely on the original pipes.<\/p>\n

But now we\u2019re 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. <\/p>\n

Infrastructure is more than pipes \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

We don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

And given the plans being laid out \u2013 which include making a sweet deal for Elon Musk\u2019s Starlink system, which hasn\u2019t been vetted at all, to replace a new system from Verizon, which people have spent years developing \u2013 people have reason to be nervous.<\/p>\n

I occasionally go up with my partner in a small plane (he\u2019s part of a flying club) and listen to the air traffic controllers and the pilots. Their professionalism never ceases to astound me. There\u2019s a whole system in place devoted to safe skies.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s less than a hundred years old (probably much less) and it makes air traffic possible.<\/p>\n

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

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

And everybody \u2013 including the airline industry \u2013 relies on it.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

There is so much damage being done that\u2019s it\u2019s hard to keep a handle on it. I\u2019m worried about the stealth cuts to Social Security built into closing offices and firing workers at an understaffed agency. I\u2019m worried about Medicaid, which is paying for a majority of people in nursing homes today.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m appalled at the \u201cwar on woke,\u201d 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\u2019s obviously racism and misogyny (and I include LGBTQ+ rights, particularly attacks on trans people, under misogyny).<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

The kind of chaotic cuts going on right now are going to make that infrastructure unreliable at best.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll 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<\/a><\/p>\n

She writes:<\/p>\n

The whole point<\/i> 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 \u2014 and<\/i> protecting habitats, preventing extinctions, and restoring ecosystems.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Exactly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

About a year and a half ago, I wrote on this blog about Deb Chachra\u2019s fabulous book How Infrastructure Works. One of the key messages I got from that book \u2013 outside of the fact that Prof. Chachra loves to tour power plants and dams \u2013 was that infrastructure makes modern life possible. We have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[335,17],"tags":[799,1021,1019,1020],"class_list":["post-3885","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-2","category-rants","tag-deb-chachra","tag-faa","tag-infrastructure","tag-noaa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3885","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3885"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3885\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3886,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3885\/revisions\/3886"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3885"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3885"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3885"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}