[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Can't take the heat

[Bill Totten]

by Andrew Stephen

New Statesman (June 19 2008)


Washington ground to a halt in a recent heatwave. What better proof of
how America's infrastructure is crumbling?

This week, I vowed, I would do something unprecedented in modern times:
I would not write a single word about the shenanigans of B****k or
Mc***n or H*****y, or even about this year's presidential election at
all. I intend to keep my word, too, with just one proviso: to say that
the subject I have chosen to write about, notwithstanding its tragicomic
aspects, should be exercising the mind of the next US president perhaps
more than any other single issue.

The fact that I sat in my top-floor office in a puddle of sweat for most
of the second week of this month because the air-conditioning had
failed, for example, is hardly something I would expect the candidates
to lose too much sleep over - even when the temperature inside crept
past 110 degrees. For me, it all culminated in a visit from Bill, my
friendly air-conditioning technician, on the morning of Friday the 13th.

What he told me symbolised much more than the strangely confused and
angry mood that consumes America when the mere subject of "energy
conservation" comes up. The ramifications went far beyond my usually
nicely cooled, breezy office. Even America's outrageous hogging of the
world's energy supplies - it comprises just five per cent of the world's
population but uses 23 per cent of its energy resources - no longer
seemed that surprising, let alone outrageous. It was what was going on
around me and Bill as we spoke early that morning that brought home
something I have been noticing with increasing alarm over the past two
decades: the sheer fragility of America's crumbling infrastructures.

To my American readers: please do not get too angry with me when I say
this, but the rapidity of the deterioration of your country's infra
structures often reminds me of an extensive tour of the Soviet Union I
undertook in 1986 - when I saw for myself, in places such as industrial
Ukraine and Siberia and St Petersburg, that the Soviet Union had already
had its day. For just as Bill and I were having our grim conversation
early that Friday morning - and unknown to either of us at the time -
the heart of the capital of the most powerful nation on earth, less than
a mile from where we stood, had been plunged into the kind of chaos one
might envisage in, say, New Delhi on a very, very bad day.

Because of the temperature, an underground train had earlier derailed as
a result of what was described as a "heat-buckle" on the tracks. Two
separate fires on the subway system were then triggered that morning by
faulty "stud bolts". Terrified, sweaty commuters sprinted up stationary
escalators while, from above, all they could hear was ambulance, police
and fire sirens zigzagging frantically around them.

In the meantime, a switch in an electrical sub-station sizzled out,
cutting power throughout central Washington - including, yes, the White
House. "It was like each man for himself ... like a third world
country", next day's Washington Post quoted 34-year-old David Zaidain,
"a city planner who was stunned by the level of anarchy he encountered
while walking to work", as saying. Pedestrians were struck by cars at
junctions where traffic lights were not working (although, miraculously,
nobody was killed).

That one fused switch alone left 12,000 customers - which, in power
company terminology, can mean one family house or a block of offices
with thousands of workers - without power, the very prospect of which
sent wealthy Washingtonians scurrying to book cool rooms or suites at
the Four Seasons.

Most were not so lucky: every day, according to the Galvin Electricity
Initiative, half a million Americans spend at least two hours without
power, at an annual cost to the nation of at least $150 billion. And
yet, with conditions like those in DC on Friday the 13th and the
politicians who created them, Americans are scared of al-Qaeda? Bush et
al scoffed at the prospect of the US joining the 174 other nations that
ratified the Kyoto Accord, on the grounds that industrial giants such as
China would then be able to take advantage of decent Americans doing the
right thing.

Back in my office, I was not surprised when Bill pronounced my
air-conditioning unit to be finished, but I was amazed to be told that,
in order to replace it, we would need a much bigger unit that would have
to be hoisted on to the roof by a crane; the street would have to be
closed, a licence obtained beforehand to do so, and the roof
strengthened to take the new weight.

Hadn't miniaturisation come to air-conditioning units, I asked Bill
incredulously? Surely China, or some other poor smog-infested country,
now churned out trillions of tiny units that cost next to nothing so
that the likes of me could sit and work in comfort? No, he told me:
because of emissions laws overseen by the Environmental Protection
Agency, air-conditioning units had become much bigger rather than smaller.

This, in fact, is a neatly illustrative little allegory that
demonstrates just how rabidly right-wing America has become in recent
decades. The EPA has become a symbol of soppy lefty hand-wringing to so
many Americans, yet it was proposed and signed into law in 1970 by none
other than President Richard Nixon.

The lesson? All that do-gooding just means that you - the decent guy -
now have to fuss around with licences and cranes while the likes of
China, India and France (the French are always guilty of something truly
diabolical) get away with murder.


Central truism

This is the one central truism about the United States that most Brits
(particularly Blair, Brown and co) fail to understand: that (Nixon's
noble exception notwithstanding) Americans instinctively reject strong
government or regulatory rule, with the result that the government
frequently fails to cope with problems or disasters (whether they be of
the magnitude of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, or the ridiculous DC dramas
on 13 June, or the collapse last August of the busy commuter I-35W
bridge over the Mississippi in central Minneapolis, which led to
thirteen deaths).

The first of three official reports into why that bridge collapsed
illustrates succinctly what I am saying. The reasons, in the words of
Construction Bulletin of 16 June, were that "the Minnesota Department of
Transportation missed opportunities to detect potentially fatal
problems, lacked money which led to poor decisions, did not have the
leadership to properly address a variety of projects, and did not
document or follow up on its inspections ..." The structure was only
forty years old, but for seventeen successive years had been deemed to
be in "poor" corrosive condition by inspectors; the American Society of
Civil Engineers, which should know what it is talking about, estimates
that some $1.7 trillion is now needed to repair America's crumbling
infrastructure.

There are some hopeful signs, however. In March this year, Americans
drove eleven billion fewer miles than they did in March 2007; they also
took 10.3 billion trips on public transport in 2007, the highest total
for fifty years. In other words, they may not be as genetically
predisposed against public transport as many think. Indeed, Americans
are outraged that a (US) gallon of petrol (the equivalent of 3.7 litres)
now costs (at my local station last Monday, at least) between $4.19 and
$4.49; I didn't have the heart to tell anyone that petrol was selling in
Britain at around GBP 1.18 a litre, almost double that.

Should anybody doubt my warnings about US infrastructure or comparisons
with the Soviet Union of two or more decades ago, I recommend Fareed
Zakaria's excellent The Post-American World (2008). Zakaria, editor of
Newsweek International, tells us that although the US remains militarily
and economically the most powerful nation on earth, its role is
changing. The world's wealthiest person is not American, but Mexican, he
says; the world's tallest building is in Taipei and will soon be
overshadowed by one in Dubai; Bollywood now makes more films and sells
more tickets than Hollywood. And where do you go if you want to shop
away to your heart's content at the world's biggest shopping mall?
Beijing, of course.

Please don't write to me to say that, because I don't want to work in
110 degrees, I am part of the problem. I know that; I don't claim any
moral superiority. I can report, too, that after I told Bill to mend my
unit as best he could, he shook his head but said he would try - and
that I am now sitting at my desk in blissfully cooled air, but doubtless
still pumping out carbon dioxide to an extent that would certainly get
me a deserved scolding from Dick Nixon.

Fareed Zakaria tells us, incidentally, that 48 million air conditioners
were made in 2005 in, er, China - compared with 200 in 1978. It's just
that these modern ones, you see, are big and designed to compete in the
world market, and ... Need I go on?

_____

Andrew Stephen was appointed US Editor of the New Statesman in 2001,
having been its Washington correspondent and weekly columnist since
1998. He is a regular contributor to BBC news programs and to The Sunday
Times Magazine. He has also written for a variety of US newspapers
including The New York Times Op-Ed pages. He came to the US in 1989 to
be Washington Bureau Chief of The Observer and in 1992 was made Foreign
Correspondent of the Year by the American Overseas Press Club for his
coverage.

http://www.newstatesman.com/north-america/2008/06/world-china-air-bill-crumbling
	

TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click
on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this
essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/