Opinion: Roads to Nowhere

There's no doubt our environment needs fixing ASAP, but our crumbling infrastructure is just as bad, and it negatively impacts our environment by being incredibly inefficient and dirty. We can actually do something about it now.

As much as I rag AOC for being generally kind of terrible when it comes to things like facts and truth, her style contrasts with Amy Klobuchar's in an interesting way. The Green New Deal remains a laughably impractical piece of legislation, but it shifted the whole conversation on environmental policy from "I don't know, is climate change a thing" to "okay maybe we shouldn't be QUITE so aggressive about it."

Meanwhile, Amy K introduced a sweeping infrastructure plan and.......nobody cared. Our infrastructure sucks. Even in California, a state that invests money in infrastructure, we are running very serious risks of systemic collapse here - mostly because our infrastructure wasn't built to withstand the effects of climate change. But while here we're focused on future-proofing dams and whatnot, the rest of the country barely has drivable roads. And no public transit. And airports falling into disrepair. Imagine the amount of work California is doing to get our infrastructure to where it should have been in the 1980s and then realize EVERYONE ELSE IS BEHIND US ON THIS.

But - unless you're Gretchen Whitmer - fixing potholes in roads just isn't sexy to run on. It's not a Big Idea (TM). It's a necessary one, but there's no political juice behind it. No political capital. Obama struggled for his whole Presidency to get a very minor infra bill passed. Jerry Brown leveraged a LOT of his political capital on a modest gas tax that will fill *half* of our backlog of roads/bridges projects.

This is a case study in where pragmatic politics wither and die. Nobody is gonna vote positively on "fixing roads." We'll just complain about potholes and be shocked when bridges collapse (something like 1/3 of our bridges are listed as at-risk, the number is frankly breathtaking). So if you want to do all of this, you have to over-compromise - give us a Hyperloop or something, hell even nationwide broadband (a great and necessary idea!) isn't sexy enough to catch the news cycle.

The regular day-to-day work of "insuring our society doesn't literally collapse" isn't sexy. Promise us something big, something sweeping, some Grade-A American F*cking Excellence, and then while we're working on that we can bury all the road-fixing bills inside of it.