Symposium Introduction
If it’s not true, it’s at least cliché: America seems incapable of building big things with the same speed, or on the same scale, as it did a century ago.
“I think about what my grandparents’ generation built: the Hoover Dam, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Interstate Highway System,” President Obama observed in 2012. “That’s what we do. We build.” But now, “we’ve got bridges and roads all over this country in desperate need of repair. Our highways are clogged with traffic. Our railroads are no longer the fastest in the world. Our skies are congested, our airports are the busiest on the planet. All of this costs families and businesses billions of dollars a year. That drags down our entire economy.”
President Trump repeated these themes throughout his own presidency. “[I]t is time to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure. American is a nation of builders,” he told Congress in his 2018 State of the Union Address. “I am asking both parties to come together to give us the safe, fast, reliable, and modern infrastructure our economy needs and our people deserve … Together, we can reclaim our building heritage. We will build gleaming new roads, bridges, highways, railways, and waterways across our land.”
For many years, conversations about American’s weak capacity for building was considered mostly in terms of traditional infrastructure: roads, bridges, and pipelines. And since the 1970s, these debates were framed mainly in terms of conservatives versus progressives, capitalists versus environmentalists.
But for the last decade, interest in development has become increasingly bipartisan and cross-ideological, due in no small part to the fact that regulatory regimes that long frustrated oil and gas companies now frustrate those who seek to build wind farms, solar arrays, and the interstate transmission lines needed to connect those power supplies to distant metropolitan consumers.
These questions will become only more pressing in the years ahead, as broader technological innovations in artificial intelligence, and America’s ever-growing reliance on cloud computing data centers to facilitate everything from our work to our home entertainment, increases dramatically our need for long-distance, high-voltage power transmission lines, particularly as state and federal regulators attempt to prioritize wind and solar power far from population centers.
