Consider This from NPR - The Infrastructure Package Was Signed By The President. Now What?

Episode Date: November 30, 2021

After years of jokes about unsuccessful Infrastructure Weeks, months of deliberation, and bouts of gridlock on the political left, a $1.2 trillion package made its way through Congress at long last. The president signed it into law earlier this month. Now, the challenge of actually getting the money where it needs to be remains.NPR's White House Correspondent Franco Ordonez followed President Biden around the country earlier this month to report on the changes to come, now that the bill is law.And NPR's National Desk Correspondent Nathan Rott reports on the portions of the infrastructure package that address resilience and protecting communities historically hit hardest by climate change. In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment that will help you make sense of what's going on in your community. Email us at [e-mail]. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

So, how about that infrastructure bill? And between the drawn-out legislative process, all the supply chain and pandemic news, and the holiday season rolling toward us, you might have blinked and missed it. I ran for president believing it was time to rebuild the backbone of this nation, which I characterize as working people in the middle class. They're the ones who built the country. And to rebuild the economy from the bottom up in the middle out. That's Biden making the case that this law is based on a central promise of his presidential campaign. This law delivers on that long overdue promise, in my view. It creates better jobs for millions of Americans. A promise some Republicans were happy to help him deliver on. It's something America desperately needs. 75 percent of American people like it. We need it. Our infrastructure is crumbling all across the country. That's right.

Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell telling local Kentucky radio station WHAS why he supported the $1.2 trillion bill. McConnell was one of 19 Senate Republicans who voted for it. Through the last two administrations of both parties, we've been trying to get together on a bipartisan basis to pass an infrastructure bill. And we finally did. Consider this. After months of tense negotiations and gridlock on the left, massive legislation that promises to improve America's infrastructure has finally passed.

And Democrats and Republicans actually work together on the politically popular bill. We'll explain what it does and what it does not. From NPR, I'm Adi Kornish. It's Tuesday, November 30th. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. It's Tuesday, November 30th. It's Consider This from NPR. $110 billion for roads and bridges. $66 billion for passenger and freight rail, $39 billion for public transit, and $17 billion for ports. Some of the big-ticket items in that infrastructure bill. I think people are excited about investments in infrastructure. Christelle Kalaf, associate director of the Center for Business and Economic Analysis at the University of Wyoming, told NPR that the most immediate impacts of the bill will

show up in the construction industry. There's going to be a bunch of jobs there. Some reports estimate that it's going to be a one million job over a five-year time period. And over time, the job those workers do will make the economy more efficient. Which means it's going to lower costs for producers. So as consumers, we might feel it in lower prices. But beyond the direct sectors that are going to be impacted by the spending, there are also going to be indirect effects in other sectors that are mostly supply chain sectors and also service sectors. It's not just roads, bridges and ports. There's also tens of billions of dollars for power infrastructure, drinking water, broadband internet and electric

vehicle chargers. That last one, the Biden administration says, is part of a larger goal in the law to spend money with climate change in mind. We need to rapidly accelerate the adoption of EVs. The president has set a very ambitious goal, 50 percent of all new cars in the country being zero emission by the end of the decade. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg spoke to NPR this month at the COP26 summit in Glasgow, where he said the law addresses the moral stakes of climate change by improving ports to make them greener and less unhealthy for the communities where they're located. Part of why that's important is at this moment, where we're trying to push more goods than ever through our ports, we have to recognize that the families and households that live near them are disproportionately Latino and Black and have

disproportionate levels of health effects due to air pollution. Let me also talk about the upside. There's more in the bill on policies like that one. We'll have more on that in a bit. But now the law has passed and the first challenge for the Biden administration is to actually spend the money. NPR's Franco Ordonez followed Biden around the country earlier this month as he tried to explain what's next. President Biden pumped his fist and smiled as the Cincinnati TV host asked him if a crumbling bridge connecting Kentucky and Ohio will finally be fixed. The answer is yes. It was an important opportunity for the president to explain to those watching WKRC at home how he'll work with state officials to finish a job that two previous

presidents could not. And so my guess is that that's going to be the choice that your governors are going to make and want to get done. And we can get it done now. We are saying to them, show us a plan that guarantees every single person in your state has access to high speed, affordable Internet. That's Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, who calls this moment a critical turning point for the digital economy. I will confess this is going to be a massive undertaking for the Department of Commerce, but we're up for it. We've been planning for months and we're up for it. That excitement and trepidation is understandable. It's a huge

amount of money, but there are new challenges, particularly how to spend it effectively. Well, it's imperative that we show the American people that this law is having a real impact as soon as possible. Josh Schwerin is a Democratic strategist who worked at a leading Biden super PAC. Republicans are already blaming Biden's agenda for rising inflation, and Schwerin says it's critical before next year's midterms that Democrats show Americans how the law is making life more affordable. Republicans are going to be out there vilifying the bill, trying to make it seem like this was just Washington playing games and spending money and not actually helping the American people. But the administration also needs to be more careful about wasteful spending, says Austin Goolsbee, who was an economic advisor to former President Barack Obama. The utmost effort needs to be on getting it right, as opposed to getting it out rapidly. These types of projects come around maybe once in a lifetime, and he says the administration

can't afford to build expensive projects such as a bridge to nowhere with questionable economic impacts. And it's a generational investment in every sense of the word, something that means a lot more to me now as a new father, because this is how we do right by the next generation before it's too late. That's Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary. He says his department will likely need to hire more people to manage all the applications. And he breaks down their work in two parts, those that are already underway that just need a boost and others that need to be stood up from scratch, like reconnecting minority communities divided by past highway

projects. It's short term, but it's long term. That's why the president talks about looking back on this moment from the 2050s. And he says that work starts now. That was NPR's White House correspondent, Franco Ordonez. Now, earlier, we mentioned some of the ways the infrastructure bill aims to address the changing climate. There's $50 billion, for instance, dedicated specifically to strengthen communities against the effects of climate change. But there are big questions about whether that level of spending is even close to enough. Here's NPR's Nathan Rott. The technical term is climate resilience. Think moving homes out of flood zones, strengthening levees, reducing vegetation in fire-prone forests.

Yeah, it can be everything from hardening power infrastructure to preserving or restoring wetlands and replacing concrete with green spaces. Laura Brush is the Resilience Fellow at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions. And then, of course, you know, we think of not only the direct physical impacts of climate change, but also how do we prepare for the economic impacts, the longer term impacts on public health. So yeah, resilience, it can mean a lot of things. Roughly $47 billion in the infrastructure bill is tagged for climate resilience, which makes it the largest such federal investment ever. Alex Hall focuses on climate change at the University of California,

Los Angeles. I think it's very positive that we are finally confronting these issues. Do I think it's enough? Of course not. The most recent National Climate Assessment estimates that adapting to worsening climate change could cost tens to hundreds of billions of dollars each year. Take California, Hall's home state, where sea levels are already rising. The state's Department of Transportation says that by the end of the decade, it will need $11 billion to adapt to rising seas alone. That's just for roadways. It doesn't include the tens of billions of dollars it would cost to fortify transportation hubs, airports, dry docks, rail systems, or the

tens of billions of dollars worth of coastal real estate increasingly at risk. And none of that is to mention wildfires or the ongoing western megadrought. So I think of it as a down payment on the money and the thought that's needed for a longer term strategy around climate resilience. The Biden administration is taking steps to limit global warming. At the climate conference in Glasgow, the U.S. and some other nations did pledge to do more to cut climate warming emissions. Regardless of what might happen, though, there is a hard reality. Human activities and the gases we've released into the atmosphere have already altered the planet, and more warming is unavoidable. Few people know that, as well as Eric Simmons, the mayor of Greenville are not using the word climate change. But what they do recognize is the climate impacts and changes that they're experiencing that affect their lives.

Sweltering heat, flooding along the Mississippi River corridor. In 2019, Greenville, like scores of other towns in the Midwest and South, was inundated after months and months of climate-fueled rains. We had 37 sewer failures because of the flood, and over 30 streets that failed in the city of Greenville because of the flood of 2019. Simmons represented his still-recovering town and others at the climate conference in Glasgow. And he says coming home to the president signing the infrastructure bill is a win. It is a great start. But truly bracing for climate change, particularly in historically disadvantaged black and brown communities like his, is going to take many more investments in the years to come. That's NPR National Desk correspondent Nathan Rott.

It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Adi Cornish.