00:00:00.000Hey, everyone. Thank you so much for listening to episode one of the Culture Study Podcast.
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00:00:48.780All right, enough of that. Let's do episode two.
00:00:53.920I feel like a lot of people have written about infrastructure and a disproportionate number of them have been white men who live in North Carolina and, you know, who just, just don't see it in the same way.
00:01:07.020They don't sort of focus on it the same way as I do.
00:02:14.460So when I said we were doing an episode about infrastructure, and we already had this plan
00:02:20.000to have you on, but it wasn't like public that you were going to be the co-host.
00:02:25.480I'm not kidding you, like a dozen people either DM'd me or wrote into the questions to suggest
00:02:31.060that we have you on. So I just love that, like, that is so legible that like you are the person
00:02:35.980that culture study readers and listeners want to hear from when it comes to infrastructure.
00:02:42.240I mean, that is truly delightful. And I think I know, you know, a part of the reason why,
00:02:46.820And it really is because the sort of the familiar perspective on infrastructure is not one that really intersects with the culture study audience.
00:02:58.060You know, if we think of it as like, oh, it's technological.
00:03:00.400If we think about it, it's like, oh, it's for the nerds.
00:03:04.640And there's many ways in which I think it really speaks to the people who listen to culture study.
00:03:09.000So the other thing that absolutely jumped out at me when I was beginning your book is the story that you use about Wile E. Coyote to illustrate the connection between infrastructure and what we take for granted and culture just broadly.
00:03:30.000So the example I use is a sort of classic Wile E. Coyote runs off a cliff, looks around, and only then does he fall.
00:03:37.600And of course, gravity is inevitable, but where we are as a society isn't.
00:03:42.100So we have built these systems that make our lives as we know them possible.
00:03:46.040And we also know that there's significant sort of costs to these systems.
00:03:50.840And the big one is that all of the energy that we use to make our daily lives possible,
00:03:55.040a significant fraction of that comes from fossil fuels.
00:03:57.200And we are starting to live with the impact of putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
00:04:01.760A secondary element is all of the actual stuff in our lives comes from somewhere and we're dealing with the impact of that sort of extraction and disposal part.
00:04:12.220So Wiley Coyote looks around, realizes there's a problem, and then he falls.
00:04:15.440And the thing I say in the book, and I'm going to reiterate, is that we don't have to fall, right?
00:04:19.620There's nothing inevitable about what happens next.
00:04:22.500I think this is a really important point because we've really been fed the narrative that climate change and broadly the environmental depredation of our planet is a bad thing that is happening and our job is to stop that bad thing.
00:04:39.040But also it's like before it's too late.
00:04:42.320And I can't tell you how much I've sort of pushed back against that sort of catastrophic framing of how to think of the impact of climate change.
00:04:51.640There is no too late. Every step that we take to try to address and change these things will, in fact, have an impact, right? It's not an all or nothing proposition. It's not a do it now or never happens proposition. It's just going to be the work for a while.
00:05:08.160But the second thing that I really want to get across is that we really get this narrative of our job is to keep bad things from happening.
00:05:17.840And I actually submit that that's actually no longer the case.
00:05:21.760The thing that has changed in the last few decades is that, and I think, you know, a lot of people, a lot of people kind of know this intellectually and we're still playing out the actual practical consequences of it.
00:05:33.220That if we now have the technology, we do now have the technology to switch to renewable energy.
00:05:41.300And that kind of changes everything in the sense of we no longer have to accept the harms that come, the global harms that come with using fossil fuels.
00:05:51.960But we can keep all of the good things that energy makes possible in our lives, right?
00:05:57.700That we don't have to reduce our ability to do things in the world, but we do have to figure out how we're going to do it.
00:06:05.060And because most of the ways in which we use fossil fuels and most of the ways we use energy, and in fact, most of the ways we interact in the world, no matter how much it feels like we're doing it as individuals, we are doing it through our collective infrastructural systems.
00:06:19.280And that means if we're going to transform them, we need to learn how to transform them together.
00:06:23.320And I think to see these systems around us, and this is the part that I also really loved, is you said that if culture is everything that is around us that we don't even really see on a daily basis, it's just the way that we live, the things that we like, how we navigate the world, infrastructure is also that oftentimes until it fails.
00:06:45.860If you travel outside the U.S. or even within the U.S. or within North America, we see this, right? That these are the systems that are the culture that we just do things this way and then we go somewhere else and it's like, holy crap, the plugs are different, right? That's the most sort of common and familiar example.
00:07:02.600and how dare they right instead of like oh it's totally random that plugs are the way that they
00:07:08.500are so it's just like any other cultural differences we notice we only we largely
00:07:14.400notice our infrastructure um when we go to different places i also love in the book how
00:07:20.580you talk about how you became an infrastructure nerd and so much of it as a kid was having some
00:07:27.980of those differences very visible to you by living in different places for longer periods of time. So
00:07:33.540can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah. So on one hand, I was sort of born into it
00:07:37.400in two different ways. So one, my father worked for the local power utility from before when I
00:07:41.560was born. But the other thing is that I was born in Toronto right at the moment where they were
00:07:50.340doing this sort of intense investment into infrastructure in advance of a significant
00:07:57.480change to how immigration was handled. So my parents were part of that first wave of
00:08:02.280non-European immigration. And at the same time, they were bringing nuclear power plants online,0.73
00:08:08.240investing in highways, and the like. So my parents emigrated from India to Canada. So my dad did
00:08:14.600just have been in Canada before joining the power utility. And so like lots of immigrant kids,1.00
00:08:19.660my family would spend summers in India. And we ended up, in fact, living there for about six
00:08:24.300months when I was nine. So going from a place like Canada, where I have kind of full stack,
00:08:30.000you know, the electricity is just there all the time, the water is clean all the time,
00:08:33.200you really, really never have to think about it, to a growing city in India, where we pretty much
00:08:39.040expected that there would be brownouts every afternoon, right? That what everyone's, you know,
00:08:44.380it was a little bit early for air conditioning, it was much more common for people to have
00:08:47.880evaporative coolers and fans. But even that was enough of a draw on the power grid that everything
00:08:55.220would sort of brown out. We had running water, and this is true in many cities of the world,
00:08:59.100we only had running water for an hour a day in the morning and evening. The quality of the water
00:09:04.660wasn't really high enough for kids with Canadian immune systems. So we definitely boiled and
00:09:11.020filtered our water, the water that came out of the tap before we drank it. And so it really
00:09:16.040made visible to me at a really young age that these systems existed at all, right? It's by
00:09:22.740seeing two different ones. It's why the contrast is what made them visible to me at all. And then
00:09:28.380then you can start getting into the oh, it's really different in these two places. Why is it
00:09:32.720different? Yeah, my question to start the episode, we have a lot of other listener questions. But
00:09:37.960like part of the reason I wanted to have you on the show too, is that I have become really
00:09:42.180fascinated with local infrastructure specifically since moving to this island because so many
00:09:48.140different parts like being off of the municipal systems has like made them visible and interesting
00:09:56.340in a way that they hadn't been before interesting frustrating all of the different things so
00:10:00.400we are part of a water system neighborhood water systems which are they're all over the place i
00:10:07.520just had no idea because I'd always been hooked up to, you know, like municipal water. And our
00:10:13.580neighborhood water system is really messed up. Like some of the pipes were just dug by 20 year
00:10:18.460olds building trenches like 50 years ago. No one knows exactly where they are. Like you have a
00:10:24.480group of volunteers who is responsible for it. It's wild. It is so wild. And then like we have
00:10:32.380a generator, lots of people on the island have generators because we do lose power. And then the
00:10:36.940most interesting thing though to me is the septic systems and you know millions and millions and
00:10:42.280millions of people are on septic systems which are kind of magical like how they work and how
00:10:47.320they like they work with the ground and all of like everything it's so interesting but then they
00:10:52.680also are a huge liability and like to me a really interesting way to think about the problem of
00:10:59.660privatized infrastructure so I wonder if you could just talk about septic systems a little bit
00:11:04.900So, you know, actually, my colleague, Professor Allison Wood, is a civil engineer who actually did her PhD work on neighborhood scale septic.
00:11:14.340So we're sort of used to thinking of it as septic systems as either being individual.
00:11:18.860And then once you have a sort of a critical mass of people with their individual systems, then it's time to go to municipal wastewater treatment.
00:11:25.340And she was investigating the sort of mid-range scale of septic systems that are neighborhood scale.
00:11:31.480It means that you can professionalize them, right?
00:11:33.640That it means that you can have someone who's responsible for them, who can hold them to sort of a higher quality standard than you might be able to do by yourself, but as a, not necessarily as a stepping stone to municipal wastewater, but actually as an alternative to municipal wastewater.
00:11:50.660And so there's actually two sort of implicit ideas in there that I want to sort of pull out.
00:11:54.360So one is, we have increasing standards for what we think is appropriate for us, right? Like what constitutes clean water and how we deal with our sewage has thankfully, right, even over the course of my lifetime, and I imagine yours, has gotten vastly improved.
00:12:11.680And so, you know, the EPA was founded right around when I was born. I live in Boston, which had famously dirty river, famously dirty harbor, but not really all that unusually so. And really, over the course of my lifetime, I've seen the water supplies around where I live get cleaner and cleaner, not in fact worse and worse, but because of concerted efforts to make them better. And some of that is technological, and a huge chunk of that is actually just policy commitments to do that.
00:12:37.500So, you know, that subject question, it's kind of the microcosm version of this. It's being able to say, like, oh, yeah, actually, we want to have higher standards and we want to have those higher standards. It's challenging for people to do it as individuals. So we're going to work on it as a community.
00:12:53.760Yeah. But the second interesting thing that that eliminates is this idea of what I think of as sort of the scale of the problem. So we're, particularly in the US, we're really used to thinking of infrastructure as coming in two varieties. Either you're sort of homesteading, the sort of do it yourself, I have my grid, I have my septic system, I have my well, I provide for myself and my household.
00:13:16.340Or, as is the case of like the vast majority of Americans get their water from only a handful of water supply systems, because all the major cities, people do not get their water individually, right? If you live in any city, really, and certainly if you live in like New York or LA, that accounts for a significant fraction of the US population right there.
00:13:35.680So this sort of mesoscale neighborhood level infrastructure is a really interesting emergent idea, this idea of like, what can we do together, as opposed to as individuals. So that's the sort of idea of neighborhood scale septic. You know, there's a group in Massachusetts that looking at neighborhood scale geothermal. So instead of having a heat pump, it's really hard to put a heat pump in, but it actually works better to do it as a neighborhood.
00:14:00.840I'm sure you've heard about microgrids, that having neighborhood energy generation and storage, there's local internet access to creating small internet systems that then all of these systems can then connect into the larger system.
00:14:16.240So I think of it as we have kind of the do-it-yourself model and we have kind of like the large scale model, but there really is a do-it-together mutual aid model, which as someone who lives in a place with a relatively small community that's not connected to the grid, I'm sure that is your world in a way that it's not mine because I live in the middle of a major city.
00:14:33.640well you know i live in washington state which is very progressive in a lot of different ways
00:14:39.280in terms of trying to figure out some of these solutions moving forward and some of them i
00:14:44.560actually don't think are unique to washington state at all i haven't looked around enough to
00:14:47.680know but like the way that the county in particular provides grants for like regular pumping right
00:14:55.360of septic systems or like we had to replace ours because it's an old old steel septic probably
00:15:02.620the original like whatever was put in when they got rid of the outhouse here in probably the 50s
00:15:09.080or 60s and we're close enough to the water that like you could never put in a septic system
00:15:16.100where we had like that wouldn't but we were grandfathered in and grandfathering like in my
00:15:22.280mind sometimes i'm like oh is that just like i don't know allowing people with various privileges
00:15:27.500to keep those privileges and now I understand it as they would rather have people do it and get it
00:15:33.900done and take care of it instead of having the cost prohibition of like oh you need to like put
00:15:40.060in an entirely new system and pump your poop uphill in order to get it into that system like
00:15:45.040that would make it so they don't replace it and then the field fails and then there's all these
00:15:49.720longs to go effects and so it's one of those cases where I see the government actually thinking in
00:15:55.200long-term instead of short-term that is really heartening. But I don't know if most people
00:16:00.060really, unless you've dealt with septic system regulations or the county, you know, checking to
00:16:06.900make sure that you've had it inspected or pumped every two years, you don't know that that's
00:16:10.580happening the same way that you don't know that regular maintenance of your, the sewage treatment
00:16:15.720facility is happening. Right. Well, yeah, it's really easy to see the sort of penalties and
00:16:20.640the punishment and when things go badly, right? It's really hard to see all of the efforts made
00:16:26.520so that things go well until, of course, those efforts cease to happen or otherwise don't work
00:16:31.780out, right? And that's a really great example because it's this idea of figuring out what is
00:16:38.440needed by individuals or individual households that can be provided at that sort of state
00:16:44.820provision level that then protects all the people around that individual. I mean, you don't have
00:16:52.220good septic for your own benefit, right? You have good septic for the benefit of everyone around you
00:16:56.600not having to deal with your poop. I mean, you're not having to deal with it as sort of a side
00:17:00.740effect. Also a bonus. Yeah, but it is protecting the water supply. And it's because we have an
00:17:06.520incredibly long history of that not being true. Yeah. Yes. Exactly. So this is a great place to
00:17:13.160transition to listener questions. We had a ton about sidewalks. And I think that's because it's
00:17:18.600one of those things that like immediately comes to mind that is super visible, like sidewalks and
00:17:23.140roads when it comes to infrastructure. So we're going to play two questions back to back. Okay.
00:17:28.200The first is from Jennifer and our producer Melody is going to read it.
00:17:32.140Sidewalks. What makes them more walkable or less so? Why do cities not invest more in helping their
00:17:38.020residents and others walk safely and comfortably? And then we have this one from Kelly.
00:17:43.160My town is up in arms about sidewalks and who pays to maintain them.
00:17:47.740Just outside of town, the tax-averse municipality doesn't have any sidewalks,
00:17:52.400leaving kids walking on narrow shoulders home from school,
00:17:55.740families on the side of busy roads on the way to the park,
00:17:58.600and employees trudging over drainage ditches just to get to work.
00:18:11.660All right. So where do we want to start here? Do you think maybe the history of sidewalks would be a good place to get into this?
00:18:18.200So I'm sure it is. And that is definitely not a thing that I feel like I'm at all an expert on. I know there's a new book by Henry Graber called, I want to say Pave Paradise, that is about the issue of cars, and how cities sort of got taken over for cars. But I do think there's sort of some broader ideas there, right?
00:18:38.900Then it's this idea of when you have things like this, who's benefiting, who's paying the costs, right? And who's being harmed. So that's kind of the first piece of it, right? And then the second piece of that is this idea of how do we see or how do we think about those benefits? And I think there's some really sort of deep human things here.
00:18:58.180I think there's humans are much better at loss aversion than we are at seeing the possibilities of new things.
00:19:05.080So and, you know, I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is, of course, famously progressive and has had an enormous amount of reshaping of the roads over the course of the last kind of five to 10 years.
00:19:16.660And there's more planned. I'm unusual, I suspect, that I am someone who commutes by car and by public transit and by bike pretty much every week.
00:19:26.100yeah and so i that means i'm on you know i'm a pedestrian most of the time i'm also like i drive
00:19:30.980i work at a engineering college out in the suburbs so i drive out there and you know i will happily
00:19:36.520bike around the city and if i'm working if i'm working at home i'm often working not at home
00:19:41.660but like at a library or elsewhere and i'll bike so i've sort of seen this development right i've
00:19:46.180seen it from from the point of view as a pedestrian and as a driver and as a cyclist
00:19:49.540and i've sort of seen even in a place like cambridge i've seen the sort of fights over it
00:19:53.660And I think a chunk of it is that it is super easy to see what you're losing when you do this. And it's very, very hard to imagine what the benefits will be before they happen. So that's the first thing. The second thing is all of those benefits, and in fact, many of the harms, are not things that we can easily put a dollar value on.
00:20:15.380It's like, how do you put, like I too have walked in places that had no sidewalks and
00:20:19.920I've been walking at the side of the road because I'm used to walking places.
00:20:23.680And so, you know, I'll be out somewhere in the suburbs and it will not occur to me that
00:20:27.700there will not be sidewalks by the side of the road and that maybe I can't comfortably
00:20:32.320It is impossible to put a dollar value on how dangerous, how disheartening it is to
00:20:40.000be trudging along the side of the road or crossing drainage dishes.
00:20:42.860And so we don't really have a very good vocabulary to talk about that and to make decisions around that. We kind of have one metric, which is like, what is the economic cost of this? Or what is the economic benefit of this? And we haven't, and the reason why I'm bringing this up is because I think this actually applies to infrastructure broadly, right? That most of the benefits of it, and in fact, many of the harms are not things that can be described in dollar terms.
00:21:11.080And I feel like we are learning or most likely relearning.
00:21:16.800I'd say relearning because we built this infrastructure in the first place.
00:21:19.320But I think ultimately we are, in fact, learning the vocabulary for how do we articulate these benefits, these harms, and how do we negotiate with the people who live around us about what we're going to do and how we're going to do it.
00:21:32.720Yeah. It makes me sad that I think one of the pieces of that vernacular now for communicating that is pedestrian deaths and cyclist deaths. And that that is not like that's it's either cost benefit analysis or it's taking those sorts of incredibly stark and tragic manifestations of the lack of safety that occurs when you don't have sidewalks or when you don't have good apparatus.
00:22:02.720apparatus for crossing the street what's the word for like um like a long um a strip mall
00:22:10.800kind of area in a suburb where you have like four or six road or like lanes and they're called like
00:22:19.660super roads or groads or something like that like they're just yeah i think i know what you mean but
00:22:24.880i like not yeah i don't know that i don't know the term of art and like you i find myself like
00:22:31.360when I would be going to some random place to report and I oftentimes go on a run in the morning
00:22:36.000and you're you look at the little map and you're like oh I could go here and then no you can't
00:22:42.760you're you're in the drainage ditch right or the other way that I could always tell almost like the
00:22:48.100politics of an area was when I would get to a crosswalk and is the crosswalk engineered so
00:22:54.580that it only shows the walk sign when someone presses the button or is it engineered to actually
00:22:59.720move between the two like acknowledging that there will always be pedestrians there yeah or
00:23:06.200is the pedestrian the exception to the rule right and actually the one I always really noticed is
00:23:10.040when you can only cross the street on like one side so you have to like cross over to the other
00:23:14.640side and it's like what the hell like everyone else is in a car like it doesn't cost them any
00:23:19.080time or energy right but it costs me I'm often again also out for a run right it costs me time
00:23:25.000and energy to have to needlessly cross the street in order to cross over it or to cross
00:23:29.180back or whatever and not to stay on my side of the road.
00:23:31.900Yeah, all of those things make it very, very clear to pedestrians that you are, in fact,
00:23:36.100second class citizens on our shared roads, right, that we're all using.
00:23:40.080And even something too, like I remember reading a big piece about curb cuts in New York City
00:23:45.500and how difficult they are for people who are in mobility devices, but also for people
00:23:51.200who are pushing strollers and but that they're there for parking right like they're there so
00:23:56.440that people can pull in and then block the sidewalk and they're just like and the the
00:24:01.600preferences for the individual there and so sometimes I think it gets to this like larger
00:24:06.560ethos which is in some ways the contrast between like political ends of the spectrum which is that
00:24:13.320like do I care about things that don't benefit me personally but but will benefit people who
00:24:17.460are not like me, or people who are not related to me? Or do I only care about things that
00:24:22.660personally benefit me? Do I only want to fund things that will personally benefit me? Yeah,
00:24:27.460how do you think about that? I mean, so one of the things about infrastructure systems,
00:24:31.240so I mean, infrastructure means a lot of things to a lot of different people. But I really focused
00:24:35.160on, you know, my background in engineering, I really focused on these technological networks,
00:24:39.180right? So this is sort of classic utility. So transportation, as we've been talking,
00:24:43.060but also like water and electricity and telecommunications, right? These sort of
00:24:46.740these sort of networks. So the thing about these as networks is that, broadly, we use these to
00:24:53.640bring things to where we use them. So it could be information, it could be energy, it could be
00:24:57.460like food, it's like supplies, or it means we're moving ourselves around, right? Transportation.
00:25:03.480The thing about this is that we all have bodies that exist somewhere on the planet,
00:25:09.160right? And which seems like a really dumb thing to say, but it is in fact true.
00:25:12.860And if we build out these networks, then we are in a relationship to the people who live around us in these networks, whether we know them or not, whether we have anything in common with them or not.
00:25:23.600I mean, this is the sort of truth about living in a city is that you're in a relationship with everyone around you because of these infrastructural networks, because you have a body that is present in this city.
00:25:33.580yes so that's where the like oh you don't really care about other people it's like i'm sorry but
00:25:38.940if you are in some if you're on the same network then you have something that you share in common
00:25:46.200with the people around you and it's actually it's actually worse than that right it's not even just
00:25:49.900the people who live around you it's these i mean these networks are essentially global now right
00:25:55.700so we can do things in some place that affects people that we may never meet on you know the
00:26:00.560other side of the country or in the other side of the planet. And we are in a relationship with
00:26:05.180those people. So, and I, you know, I think of, and actually I think of this as the idea of
00:26:09.540infrastructural citizenship, right? That we have, we have our passport that says where you're allowed
00:26:13.920to live, but ultimately we have this deep relationship with the people who share the
00:26:19.900land on which we're currently living today, but also into the future. And so we kind of don't
00:26:25.340get to say, well, I don't really care about these other people. It's like, you're, you're in a
00:26:29.180relationship with them, whether you like it or not. And I, you know, I always really like the
00:26:32.800idea of politics as what you get when you have a sustained relationship with people that you can't
00:26:37.780easily walk away from, right? That you have to decide how are you going to work together
00:26:42.180on things. It's not, it's not about, you know, political parties. It's not about voting.
00:26:47.540It really is. It's a sustained relationship. You can't easily leave. And that is really true of
00:26:53.660where you live or where you are, right? That you don't get to get out of this relationship
00:26:58.100just because you decide you don't like your neighbors or because you want to try to live
00:27:02.780by yourself, you're on the same network. You're sharing the same space. This really is a challenge,
00:27:08.620right, to figure out how to work across any of those divides. Fortunately, broadly, people do
00:27:15.340actually, you know, everyone says, oh, no one cares about infrastructure. Nobody really, you know,
00:27:19.460nobody likes it. And I think that is 100% not true. I think that. Absolutely. Yeah. I think
00:27:24.980Everybody cares deeply about infrastructure.
00:27:27.000Many people really love infrastructure.
00:27:29.240And certainly, no matter where people sit on their sort of political divide, there is an understanding that infrastructure serves many of us well.
00:27:36.640And what we really want is to serve more of us better.
00:27:40.060I mean, if anyone tries to say that no one cares about infrastructure, I invite them to come to like any dinner, like family gathering.
00:27:49.760It's particularly here in the West where people talk about roundabouts because there's more roundabouts now.
00:27:58.620This is a good segue into talking about cars, which I think is another thing that people care a lot about and sometimes don't know how to extract themselves or how to affect change in this larger system.
00:28:33.580There is literally nowhere they can walk safely.
00:28:36.240A culture in which pedestrians are blamed for their own deaths.
00:28:40.940A giant car arms race leading to ever-deadlier collisions.
00:28:44.620a sedentary lifestyle that many cannot escape from lonely seniors who are too old to drive
00:28:50.820but have no access to public transit the fact that a major reason parents take their kids
00:28:55.880to disney world is because it's a place their kids can walk around safely that is all these
00:29:02.400things i i feel it and um how in just to kind of get us started here how car dependent is the
00:29:10.500united states comparative to other like where are we on the spectrum are we the most car dependent
00:29:16.420first of all i don't know if we can i want to talk about the united states as a whole
00:29:20.260as like the most right yeah and so i mean i always say that the i mean this is i you know
00:29:24.860i grew up outside the united states and i've spent time outside the country and i always say
00:29:28.340that the u.s is 50 different countries in a trench coat which is the thing that's hard for
00:29:32.300and actually it's probably more than 50 i mean if you like eastern west washington and western
00:29:35.760Washington are not the same place. But in particular, you know, because of the sort of
00:29:41.060distribution. So like if you live in New York, if you live in New York City and you don't have a car
00:29:45.760and you never need a car versus large parts of the United States where that's not true. And that's
00:29:49.480true of other places too, right? That's not specific to the US. So they're, you know, it
00:29:54.040absolutely, I don't know, I don't know if it makes sense to say like we are the most car dependent
00:29:57.780country. However, it is absolutely true. Two things are absolutely true. One is many of our cities can
00:30:03.340really only be navigated by car, right? That it's like significantly easier, faster, less expensive
00:30:09.960to get around by car. It might only be possible to get around by car than it is in other places.
00:30:17.540And that's particularly true when you think about intercity travel, right? That it's very,
00:30:22.140very hard to get across the United States without either driving or flying, right? Those are pretty
00:30:28.180much our options. There's not a lot of trains, there's very little sort of public travel. I mean,
00:30:31.300flying is mass transit, right? It's just not public. It's privatized. Although again,
00:30:36.400we know that airlines have been supported in various different ways. So I think many of us
00:30:45.880understand that we live in a society, in a culture that is deeply dependent on cars. And I think
00:30:51.560many people also realize that this was a choice, right? That this is not a thing that happened
00:30:56.680And naturally, it was an actual decision that was made by many of our forebears who decided that they wanted to live in a world where people had access to, in theory, their own private, you know, the freedom of having their private vehicle that they could leave when they want to leave.
00:31:14.840They could come home when they want to come home.
00:31:16.380Cars are actually kind of amazing for that.
00:31:49.380And we've sort of committed to one and not committed to the other.
00:31:53.280And in fact, have uncommitted. People talk about this in LA. It's like, oh, LA had all these streetcars. That's true of many places, right? Because that was the only option to move around before we had this sort of easy, widespread access to fossil fuels.
00:32:08.980but like as vivian noted that ability to access that freedom that comes from having cars is by
00:32:15.620no means evenly distributed and certainly you know every one of us if we're a driver if we're
00:32:22.560like i'm happy getting around in my car at some point in our lives that is going to become no
00:32:27.360longer true right like we're all going to age we're all going to lose our capacity there's going
00:32:32.100to be a moment where we're going to be like i cannot no longer drive safely that is also true
00:32:36.520of everyone under the age of 16. That is also true of everyone who, for whatever reasons of sort of
00:32:42.720disability or sort of non-standard ability, cannot drive safely. We already know that this approach
00:32:49.660does not serve large swathes of our population. And in fact, as I said, if you feel like you're
00:32:54.580well-served by your car today, someday you will not be well-served by being expected to drive
00:32:59.320everywhere. So then the question is, well, what do we do about this, right? How do we start moving
00:33:05.780over. And I think that there really has been the sort of widespread awareness that this is a thing
00:33:12.660we want to change. And one really great piece about it is that this isn't an all or nothing
00:33:19.860proposition. And particularly because we have access to things like, you know, just in time
00:33:25.720transit. So I think about like public micromobility, like Los Angeles has been experimenting
00:33:30.460with sort of small scale buses that don't necessarily have fixed routes, that are kind
00:33:35.700of halfway between a bus and an Uber, which wouldn't have been possible before people
00:34:23.760Like, that's, you know, that's the getting your kids to school piece of it. That's not the, like, how do we connect up cities across 3000 miles of continent answer. But they're, you know, they're really closely related, right? So seeing the new possibilities, and thinking about how do we build out these networks.
00:34:38.840Yeah, I see this in the Seattle light rail, which like there was, I always wondered if there was ever going to be the political will to actually do a light rail project after the disaster of the monorail project in the early 2000s. And I love it. I love it so much. Like it is so incredible to get down to the airport. If you're going to any sort of sporting game, like people actually use it.
00:35:02.660And the beautiful thing is that it keeps expanding and it's going to keep expanding in so many different directions.
00:35:09.620And part of the reason they're able to muster that political will to do it is because it's working.
00:39:10.100Unfortunately, there is no equivalent of an accelerator
00:39:12.040for lots of forms of renewable energy,
00:39:14.020for, you know, for like sunshine or wind.
00:39:16.160And of course, it is possible to have, there's a, I want to say dunkelflaute, the German word for dark doldrums, right?
00:39:22.640When you have a cloudy and windless day.
00:39:25.640So neither your solar nor your wind generation is really working.
00:39:29.800So instead of trying to do this like hyper-optimized match demand and supply, we can instead build in buffers, right?
00:39:37.800And so giving everyone batteries is essentially putting in a grid scale energy storage network.
00:39:45.260You're building in resilience even on days that seem like perfectly fine days, right?
00:39:49.960Not emergencies, because it just means that you can smooth out the variation in supply so that everyone has access to energy that they need because there's a sort of built-in buffer.
00:40:02.480In fact, you can get even more clever if you've heard about things like the smart grid.
00:40:05.960You can use it to sort of, you know, if you know that a lot of people are going to use electricity in the afternoon, for example, on a hot day in the summer where everyone's running the air conditioners, you can use this battery storage to kind of arbitrage like when are you generating energy and when are you storing it and when are you going to use it?
00:40:23.760So as the systems get smarter and they talk to each other and they talk to the utility, you can start doing all of the things that we sort of talked about doing when we have renewable energy, which is having a smart grid, really bringing to bear sensors and communication.
00:40:41.620And instead of having this sort of just-in-time grid, we can start having the system that makes renewable systems really work.
00:40:48.780So yes, the immediate thing is you will keep your power when there's a snowstorm, but the actual long-term goal is we have a robust and reliable, fully renewable energy grid.
00:41:00.400I love this. This is making me think about it so different. And it's so much better than my propane power generator, right?
00:41:06.920Yeah, like on many different levels. But that makes so much sense. And I hope that this really answers Caroline's question.
00:41:15.520So our next one is about infrastructure that you don't necessarily see or participate in directly.
00:41:21.260This is from Kira, and Melody's going to read it as well.
00:41:24.240Almost every wastewater treatment plant in the coastal United States is built near sea level.
00:41:29.640Most of them are aging, rusting, corroding.
00:41:32.740Is the United States going to systematically replace these plants?
00:41:36.380Or are we wading, literally, into a murky new era where we are going to need new landscape systems to clean wastewater?
00:41:43.220Well, so first of all, wastewater treatment, they are, of course, at sea level for a reason, which is that water and also waste flows downhill.
00:41:53.460And so it means that you, so I live in Boston where there's like a single giant plant called the Deer Island Wastewater Treatment Plant that's across the harbor, like across a channel from Boston Logan, which are both built out sort of in Boston Harbor.
00:42:06.980And so, yes, there are pumping stations, but broadly, you know, everything just, you know, if you flush the toilet or water goes down the drain, everything just gets carried downhill.
00:42:14.660So, yeah, they're typically built at the lowest point around, which is sea level.
00:42:18.220Whereas, of course, our clean water comes from the highest point around and then flows downhill.
00:42:22.780So it comes in New York City. It comes from up the Hudson River in San Francisco.
00:42:27.520It comes from the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir in the Sierras and so forth.
00:42:31.320there's no getting around the fact that physical systems decay over time, right? So one way or
00:42:38.040another, we're going to have to do something to make sure that these stay up and running, right?
00:42:42.020And that means maintaining them, repairing them as they break down. It means replacing them as
00:42:47.320they need to be replaced. It also, which is, I think Kira is alluding to here, because they're
00:42:52.260on, they tend to be at sea level. If sea level rise is going to become an issue where you live,
00:42:56.720figuring out how to harden them against storm surge, hurricanes, and so forth is going to
00:43:01.280be a big issue. There's no, there's really no getting around the fact, you know, I already
00:43:06.980alluded to the fact that because we tend to use energy through fossil fuels and through these
00:43:11.920shared systems and our infrastructural systems are powered, that means that they are the major
00:43:15.840way in which we as individuals contribute to climate change. They are also the systems that
00:43:20.640are going to be the most affected by climate change because they move things around the
00:43:25.700landscape, right? So whether it's, you know, electricity being brought to our houses or
00:43:29.180whether it's sewage being taken away from our houses, if the landscape in which they're embedded
00:43:33.560is changing, and in a future that looks very different, the next 100 years is going to look
00:43:38.360very different than the past 100 years, no matter what we do, no matter how well we sort of mitigate
00:43:43.120climate change at this point, that it means we're all going to need to figure out how to deal with
00:43:48.040that. And we're going to need to bake that in. So one of the things I also say is that if you live
00:43:53.120in North America, and particularly if you I mean, if you live in the United States,
00:43:55.740if you live really anywhere in the developed north like we we are the richest civilization
00:44:01.360that has ever existed in human history right like our history as a species and no matter how you
00:44:08.560measure that right whether it's money and i personally think of it in terms of energy not
00:44:12.800dollars right like in terms of what we can do what we can do together our sort of level of
00:44:17.560technological sophistication our level of agency our level our ability to cooperate together there
00:44:24.620is absolutely no reason why we cannot decide that we will build wastewater that works for us in 50
00:44:31.460years, right? That we can build a left, you know, I do not remember this, I was too young. But like
00:44:36.240Jimmy Carter, during the height of the oil crisis, told everyone that you should turn your thermostat
00:44:40.000down and wear a sweater. And like, that's not the future, right? It used to be that if you wanted to
00:44:45.720have access to energy, it had to be through fossil fuels. That's not the case anymore. Yeah. So it
00:44:51.080really is the political question of how you know allocating the money that we have to things that
00:44:58.560are genuinely meaningful to all of us like adequate wastewater treatment we have like
00:45:06.780air conditioners on the steering wheels of our cars we have figured out how to do that we could
00:45:13.120figure out how to update our wastewater treatment like there's all of these like frivolous or like
00:45:20.120wonderful things about being an incredibly smart like we're at this point in our civilization
00:45:27.000where we can do so much and we just have to make sure that we include that in the so much
00:45:32.820you know there's that standing joke about like oh like we were promised jetpacks in the future
00:45:37.220it's like we actually kind of have jetpacks right that's what electric cars are they're like you as
00:45:41.900an individual have access to all of this energy to like go around and like move around and do stuff
00:45:47.020it's also kind of weird and dangerous for yourself and for the people around you
00:45:50.140but like we we're really good at doing that at an individual level but you know the future i was
00:45:54.940promised had trains right like i want yeah jetpacks and trains like i the future i mean i'll you know
00:46:02.520utopian visions of the future like people don't generally have jetpacks what they generally have
00:46:06.260is like public transport right and um so i want that future um for a bunch of reasons and we we
00:46:13.980you know, we figured out a lot of the individual technological sophistication, right? Like,
00:46:18.940I think my iPhone is amazing, right? I think that electric cars and like cars generally are kind of
00:46:24.080amazing. But figuring out how to put the emphasis on the other side, right, for these collective
00:46:30.060systems is the thing that we are not very practiced at. And I think a chunk of that is actually part
00:46:36.200of the reason why I wrote this book is to give ourselves some visibility into these systems as
00:46:43.440collective and as non-monetary, right, as having value that is not economic, as having harms that
00:46:51.340can't be measured in dollars. Okay, I think this is a great way for us to do our last question,
00:46:56.360which I think offers us, even though it's a little bit pessimistic, a way to be optimistic.
00:47:02.860This is from Claire, and Melody's going to read it.
00:47:05.420Is it the case that large-scale infrastructure is no longer politically viable to build?
00:47:10.480My partner and I were discussing this the other day, whether large works are somehow publicly unpalatable and politically infeasible.
00:47:18.460Are small or comparable investments in different communities necessary to move funding or projects along politically?
00:47:26.080So the first thing I'll say in response to this is that I am so thrilled that we have a large scale infrastructure project that is about to start on our island,
00:47:34.600which is that we are getting an electric ferry to replace our ferry that is from 1962 and
00:47:42.960it's been a huge process that has involved the community in terms of like applying for
00:47:48.100the national grants that have a lot and we have matching dollars from the county and all of this
00:47:52.460stuff it's going to take a long time it's really complicated because there's eelgrass and we have
00:47:56.580to replace some of the docks to put in the electric stuff but like i was in norway a couple years ago
00:48:01.560I saw these electric ferries. They feel like the future. It is going to be fantastic. And it is a huge, large-scale infrastructure project that was made possible, not through individual politicians, but through community might. And so I wonder if that's maybe a way for us to start talking about this.
00:48:18.880And in fact, you actually alluded to applying for grants and getting sort of support, right?
00:48:22.900So I really loved, there's a developmental economist, Amartya Sen, who worked with pretty
00:48:27.880much the poorest communities on the planet, right?