The Crisis of Infrastructure Resilience: The Clash of Blue, Green, and Red

8/7/2019 The Crisis of Infrastructure Resilience: The Clash of Blue, Green, and Red

1/12

2008, Lewis J. Perelman2008, Lewis J. Perelman

The Crisis of Infrastructure Resilience:The Crisis of Infrastructure Resilience:

The Clash of Blue and GreenThe Clash of Blue and Greenand Redand Red

Dr. Lewis J. PerelmanDr. Lewis J. PerelmanPresentation to

The Economic Security Working Group

U.S. Department of Commerce

October 21, 2008

2008, 2009 Lewis J. Perelman


2/12


Three Major Competing AgendasThree Major Competing Agendas

The Green Agenda: Sustainability

The Blue Agenda: Security

The Red Agenda: Solvency

Overlaid on economic and cultural interests that traditionally have shaped infrastructure development, the

rising demand for sweeping infrastructure renewaleven reinventionis being driven three competing policy

The green agenda identifies itself with Sustainability. The green movement, as is widely understood,

advocates environmental protection, resource conservation, renewable resources, and green buildings and

infrastructure, among other things, especially climate protection. Its notion of sustainability commonly is

associated with corporate social responsibility (CSR) as indicated by such metrics as the triple bottom line

(meant to merge economic, environmental, and social welfare goals in corporate accounting).

The blue agenda is primarily focused on Security, including Safety. It embraces the demands for

national and homeland security. Its mission starts from preventing or protecting against various hazards or

threats against human security and extends to responding to attacks or disasters when they occur, and

recovering from their consequences. The menu of blue concerns spans the spectrum of human anxieties,

including: war, terrorism, violent crime, industrial accidents, infectious disease, and economic, social, or

political disasters as well as all sorts of natural disaster.

The red agenda is that of the harsh financial and fiscal realities that determine Solvency or, more urgently

now, its opposite. The color of this agenda aptly reflects the red ink of the ocean of debt in which America

and many of its global partners are now drowning. Across a span of years past, exponents of the red agenda

sounded alarms about the impending threats of rising deficits and national debt, unfunded liabilities,

excessively easy money and cheap credit, overleveraging, opaque accounting, lax regulation, and the house ofcards built of synthetic financial derivatives. Now the day of reckoning has arrived and the alarms that were

ignored, and the corrections that were postponed, no longer can be avoided.

agendas. The demands of these agendas is a problem in three colors: green vs. blue vs. red.


3/12


The Clash of AgendasThe Clash of Agendas

Solvency

InSolvency

Synergy

Sustainability Security

Politics traditionally is slanted to avoid zero-sum games and to serve all demandssimultaneously. And there are some specific cases where cost-effective solutions exist thatcan serve both security and environmental objectives while containing or reducing overallbudget costs.

But the zone of happy synergy between green and blue agendas is limited. In far more

cases the green and blue agendas compete for resources and design requirements. Up untilthe recent past, rather than tradeoffs being reconciled in some kind of rational designprocess, the conflicts often were simply fudged, with extra green and blue baubles heapedon groaning architectural Christmas trees to appease separate constituencies, and the bloatedcosts paid through separate line items. In the past that was wasteful; from now on it will beincreasingly impossible.

The tide of red ink rising from below the black line of solvency in the chart already limitsthe comfortable zone of synergy. The prodigious financial demands of either the blue or thegreen agendas already has begun to seem infeasible.


4/12


The ClashThe Clash

The Southeast drought: city v. fish v. power

Nuclear power: climate v. weapons/accidents

EPA Smart Growth v. public safety

Other examples: BRAC, Fort Belvoir: security v. traffic pollution

The HurriquakeNail: durability v. recycling

US-Mexico border: fence v. wildlife

Navy sonar training range v. whales

Seattle Viaduct: new urbanism v. lifeline

Some of many possible examples of the blue vs. green clash include:

The recent drought in the Southeast US at times left the 4 million people in metropolitan Atlantawith only enough water to last about 90 days. Yet the US Corps of Engineers was required to releasea billion gallons of water a day from the citys main Lanier reservoir to protect an endangeredspecies of fish downstream in Florida; the water also is needed to cool the Farley nuclear power plantin Alabama.

Some environmentalists now advocate expanding nuclear power to fight global warming; othersclaim that the threat of nuclear accidents and weapons proliferation makes nuclear powerunacceptable.

Police, fire, and other public safety officials object that the EPAs Smart Growth program leads to

dense developments with narrow streets that hinder access by emergency vehicles. Many recentSmart Growth developments have sprung up in vulnerable areas of the Gulf Coast devastated byprevious hurricanes. (See next slide.)

Other examples are:

The federal government plans to move some 20 thousand defense workers from urban offices in theWashington area to the more secure location of Fort Belvoir. But local officials and citizens inNorthern Virginia protest that the increased traffic congestion will increase air pollution and energyconsumption.

The Bostitch Hurriquake nail was designed to increase the ability of wooden buildings to survivewind damage by 200% and earthquake damage by 50%. But a leading green building architectcomplains that it will make collapsed buildings harder to recycle.

The fence designed to thwart illegal immigration, and possible terrorist intrusion, along the US-Mexican border is challenged by lawsuits form environmental groups who claim it will impedewildlife migration and damage the environment.

Environmental organizations also have sued to stop the US Navys plans to test and train with newsonar systems, which may cause beaked whales to beach themselves.

Since a 2001 earthquake rocked the Seattle area, environmentalists have called for removing theAlaska Way Viaduct to improve the citys waterfront environment and discourage commuting. Butemergency management officials want to strengthen the Viaduct to protect the citys transportationlifelinesfor evacuation, rescue, and recoveryin the event of future disasters.


5/12


CanCan Smart GrowthSmart Growth be in dumbbe in dumblocations?locations?

Seaside, FL: Smart Growth

Galveston, TX after Hurricane Ike

Will this

become this?

Research by Prof. Philip Berke and colleagues at the University of North Carolina found

that many Smart Growth communities are being built in coastal and other locations highly

vulnerable to disaster.

This, among other examples, illustrates how disconnected the Green concept ofsustainability is from the common-sense notion of survivability. And why

sustainability is often not really sustainable or sustained.


6/12


The Red ChallengeThe Red Challenge

Blue demands: $2+ Trillion/5 years Green demands: $ X Trillions/Y years

Red crisis: $10 Trillion federal debt

$1 Trillion outstanding credit-card debt

$1 Trillion for housing, financial bailouts

Hard realities of entitlements:

70% of federal budget by 2030 20% of US GDP by 2034

The costs of meeting the demands of either the blue or green infrastructure agendas

separately loom large. Estimates from the American Society of Civil Engineers and others

indicate that $2 trillion needs to be spent over a span of five years just to moderately

mitigate the danger to public safety posed by Americas crumbling, brittle, and hazardous

infrastructure.

While the real costs and potential benefits of the green agenda just for climate

protectionmitigating the expected future impacts of global warmingare debated, even

the more modest estimates imply infrastructure renovation costs to the U.S. on a similar

scale of hundreds of billions of dollars annually. The cost of the Warner-Lieberman bill of

2008 alone was estimated at $1 trillion or more. (The CBO estimate of the cost of the

Waxman-Markey bill of 2009 of more than $800 billion was widely criticized for omitting

most of the negative economic impacts of reduced business activity and employment caused

by higher energy costsprojected to be several times greater.)

All this comes at a time when America now stands at the edge of a fiscal cliff, beyond

which stretches an abyss of economic disaster from mushrooming debt, financial collapse,

and ballooning entitlements.

$2 Trillion deficit

$50-100 Trillion unfunded liabilities


7/12


The Red ChallengeThe Red Challengemoremore

Estimated economic cost of globalwarming = $48-76 Trillion

Value of Credit Default Swaps sold in2007 = $62 Trillion

Total outstanding amount of financial

12x World GDP

The squeeze of massive and growing debt has been compounded by the cancerous impact

on the global financial system of inadequate regulation and the explosive spread of

synthetic financial assets.

What once seemed like a prodigious potential economic cost of global warming at the end

of the century now appears minor compared to the enormous, immediate threat of toxic

financial assets.

derivatives = $684 Trillion (2008)


8/12


Possible SynergyPossible Synergy

Telework Less energy, less pollution, more security, lower cost,

higher productivity

Zero-energy buildings

More resilient emergency facilities?

Marines, Air Force:

Solar, renewable, recycling tech

Green + blue red: infrastructure

Near-term ROI from efficiency that just-in-case hazardmitigation lacks

The green and blue agendas do not always need to be in conflict. There even are

opportunities for positive synergy. For example, Telework reduces emissions and saves

energy and other resources, moreover not only saving money but improving productivity,

and on top of that enhancing security and disaster resilience. Zero-energy buildings could

enable police or fire stations, shelters, hospitals, communications facilities, embassies, and

such to keep functioning in the wake of a disaster even when electrical or fuel supplies areinterrupted.

And while it may not serve everyones priorities, even the Defense Department has an

increasing, practical interest in green solutions. The Marine Corps is looking to apply solar,

renewable, and recycling technologies on the sites of operations in places like Iraq or

Afghanistan, to reduce the need for vulnerable truck convoys to supply fuel and water. And

the Air Force, which is as pinched by high fuel costs as airlines or anyone else, is making a

serious effort to develop and use biofuels, synthetic fuels, or other alternatives.

Moreover, green infrastructure investments can offer near-term, tangible returns from

efficiencies in energy and resource use that just-in-case investments in hazard risk

mitigation often do not. To the extent that the design features of both can be integratedeconomically, the economics of hazard mitigation could become more attractive while

sustainability could become more truly equivalent to survivability.


9/12


Synergy or Compromise?Synergy or Compromise?

US Embassy,

Baghdad

Freedom Tower, New York

Federal Bldg,

San Francisco

Fortress America; but not efficient

Greening + hardening = $$$$$

Solid concrete anti-blast wall

Green wind turbines & rain storage

Safety trimmed to lower rents

Most of the casualties of the bombings of the Murrah Building (Oklahoma City) and US

embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were caused by shattered window glass, not structural

collapse. Since then, building security criteria have stressed replacing glass curtain wallswith solid concrete/masonry, as in the new US embassy in Baghdad on the left.

The Freedom Tower (center), planned to replace the World Trade Center towers, embodies

a mlange of compromises of security, sustainability, economic, and aesthetic demands.

These include a solid concrete outer wall rising 200 feet from the base, to deter bomb

attack, and wind turbines in the top levels to earn renewable energy credit.

The new San Francisco Federal Building (on the right), designed to win LEED Gold or

Platinum certification, is encased in glass to provide natural illumination. Windows open

automatically for natural ventilation. All of which makes the building vulnerable to attack

by blast or by CBR weapons. The windows of the San Francisco building are covered with a

steel mesh and are made of blast-resistant glass, to mitigate the impact of bomb attack.However these expensive features substantially increased the cost of construction. The

General Services Administration so far has declined to provide data to indicate whether the

total lifecycle cost of this structure is greater or less than that of alternative, less green

designs. However, a GSA official stated that the State Departments embassy design chose

to minimize windows in favor of concrete outer walls to reduce costs.


10/12


NeededNeeded

A new, coherent, doctrine ofinfrastructure Resiliencethat is:

Effective

Efficient

Affordable

Politically realistic

Blue and green optimists would like to believe that America is rich enough to pay the price

tag for each of their agendas simultaneouslyand that there is no zero-sum game

between the demands for greater security and sustainability. But the fast-unfolding

economic and financial crises suggest that the country may be hard pressed to pay for either.

It clearly cannot afford duplicative, contradictory, or wasteful efforts.

All of which underscores the urgency to come up with a new doctrine of infrastructure

renewal that is effective, efficient, affordable and politically realistic.


11/12


Practical IssuesPractical Issues

Potential for synergy Within budget limits

Tradeoffs in practice

Within budget limits

Economics

Risk/benefit/cost analysis

Real Politics

To Do

Potential for synergy. What design elements or solutions produce, or could produce,

benefits that simultaneously serve both security/safety and environmental efficiency

demands, within budget limitations?

Tradeoffs in practice. How do planners, architects, or engineers resolve conflicts and

establish priorities between demands for security/safety and demands for environmental

efficiency, again within budget limitations?

Economics. What are the relative risks, costs, and benefits of competing blue and green

agendas for infrastructure renewal? What capital resources are available to meet either

or both demands? How reliable is the accounting for the risks, costs, and benefits of

each? What accounting improvements are needed?

Real politics. What are the actual political interests and conflicts surrounding the blue and

green policy agendas? What specific initiatives are most likely and least likely to be

politically do-able?

To Do. What should be done to resolve intersecting blue and green infrastructure

development issues by (a) the public sector? (b) the private sector? (c) philanthropy? (d)academia? (e) nongovernmental organizations?


12/12


ChurchillChurchill

Sometimes it is not enough to do our best.

We must do what is required.

CONTACT:

Dr. Lewis J. Perelman

Email: [email protected]

Documents

The Crisis of Infrastructure Resilience: The Clash of Blue, Green, and Red