Friday 29th of March 2024

we have a deal...

ladderladder

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Live Updates: Biden Agrees to Bipartisan Group’s Infrastructure Plan, Saying ‘We Have a Deal’


The plan is expected to increase federal spending by nearly $600 billion but leave many of President Biden’s economic proposals, including investments in child care and much of his climate agenda, for a future bill.

 

Read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/06/24/us/joe-biden-news

 

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I was going to do a cartoon about this "compromise", but I was a bit too lazy this morning... So I went on a hunt for US cartoons about the "infrastructure plans" and THERE WERE MANY... I picked this one and added a ladder as the "compromise"...

 

I thought the cartoon below was too cutting but funny...

 

Note: it has been reported that Biden's "whisperer" was key to achieve the compromise. Who is Biden's whisperer?... Possibly his younger sister... 

competition...

competitioncompetition

rubble...

 

A 12-storey oceanfront apartment block in Florida has partially collapsed, killing at least one person, with dozens of rescuers combing the rubble for survivors.

Key points:
  • Online videos showed a large portion of the 12-storey building reduced to rubble

  • Emergency services sent dozens of response units to the scene, near to the local beach

  • Miami Beach Police Department said its officers were "assisting the Town of Surfside at a partial building collapse"

Nearly 100 people were still unaccounted for at noon local time, authorities said, raising fears the death toll could climb sharply.

But officials did not know how many were in the tower when it fell at about 1:30am on Thursday local time.

Video footage posted online showed a large portion of the building in the suburb of Surfside, just north of Miami Beach, reduced to rubble, with apartments' interiors exposed.

Scores of rescue units rushed to the partially collapsed building and firefighters were seen pulling survivors from the concrete debris.

A fire official said dozens of people had been rescued, including two who were pulled from the rubble as response teams used trained dogs in a search for survivors.

Hours after the collapse, searchers were trying to reach a trapped child whose parents were believed to be dead.

Rescuers also saved a mother and child, but the woman’s leg had to be amputated to remove her from the rubble, Frank Rollason, director of Miami-Dade Emergency Management, told the Miami Herald.

...

 

Officials said the building, built in 1981, was going through a recertification process requiring repairs and that another building was being newly constructed next door, although the cause of the collapse remained unclear.

On video footage captured from nearby, the centre of the building appeared to fall first, with a section nearest the ocean teetering and coming down seconds later as a huge dust cloud swallowed the neighbourhood.

The area is a mix of new and old apartments, houses, condominiums and hotels, with restaurants and stores serving an international combination of residents and tourists.

 

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-24/surfside-florida-apartment-building-collapses/100242850

 

There are many possible causes and combination of causes for such collapse to happen and investigators will have to work overtime. Concrete cancer, age of building, shoddy construction, skakes from building construction next door and "global warming"... Hello? Global warming? Being on the coast, the foundations of building such as this can become affected by rising sea level — say, undermining the sands... My guess would be for the tenants of the remaining towers to find alternative accommodation. Their own apartment would be on shaky grounds...

 

Condolences to all the family of the dead people...

 

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GOP, snookered?

 

 

From Brian Riedl — a senior fellow at the (conservative) Manhattan Institute

 

 

Republicans negotiating a bipartisan infrastructure deal are walking into a trap set by Democrats.

President Biden has proposed $4 trillion in (loosely defined) infrastructure spending, and reached out to Senate Republicans to determine what they will accept as part of a bipartisan deal. Senate Republicans have reportedly agreed to $580 billion over the decade in more traditional infrastructure spending such as roads, bridges, transit, airports, electric power, and water infrastructure.

As part of the agreement, Republicans stripped out the non-infrastructure requests, such as nearly $1 trillion in corporate subsidies and $400 billion for long-term care. These Republicans can ensure the 60 votes necessary to pass the Senate without a filibuster.

However, there is a catch. Democrats are still allowed to pass at least one more reconciliation bill this year — a bill that cannot be filibustered and can therefore pass the Senate with only the 50 Democratic votes. Reconciliation bills are usually limited to one per year, but Democrats were allowed a second bill this year because last year’s Senate Republican majority did not pass one (and it is possible that a budget law technicality could allow additional reconciliation bills).

So what is to stop Senate Democrats from passing the rest of the $4 trillion infrastructure package themselves through reconciliation? Republicans provide bipartisan cover for the first $580 billion, even agreeing to new tax revenues, and then all the other taxes and extraneous spending that Republicans worked to strip from this package would simply be passed by Democrats in a party-line vote shortly thereafter.

In fact, Biden and Democrats are openly bragging about this bait-and-switch. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that the House will not take up the Senate’s bipartisan infrastructure agreement until Senate Democrats also force through a partisan reconciliation bill with the trillions in additional spending that Republicans stripped out.

 

Shortly thereafter, Biden also demanded a reconciliation bill, declaring, “If this (bipartisan deal) is the only thing that comes to me, I’m not signing it.” Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is reportedly drafting a staggering $6 trillion reconciliation bill — the most expensive bill in American history — filled with progressive wish lists in infrastructure, climate, and health care.

So then what is the point of Senate Republicans spending months negotiating this slimmed-down bill? With the promise of a follow-up reconciliation bill, they are merely giving bipartisan credibility to a process in which Democrats will ultimately retain a blank check for whatever they want.

 

The whole initiative is flawed. America’s infrastructure can certainly use some upgrades, but Washington is throwing money at infrastructure without reforming its status among the world’s most expensive, bureaucratic, and slowly built.

The Congressional Budget Office found that federal investments deliver returns averaging just 5 percent — compared to 10 percent for the private sector. The inflation-adjusted cost of interstate construction spending per mile quadrupled from 1960 through 1990, and has continued to grow since then.

Labor costs are higher in part because the Davis-Bacon Act raises wage costs by as much as 22 percent, and America requires many more workers to do the same building work as Europe. US subway systems are by far the most expensive to build in the world, and in New York City cost quadruple the world average.

The environmental impact statements required for large projects commonly exceed 1,000 pages and require on average seven years to complete (compared to no more than one to two years in Canada and 3.5 years in the European Union), and sometimes as long as 17 years. How about addressing these costs and delays and ensuring our tax dollars are spent effectively?

 

As for paying for infrastructure, Congress could repurpose the $350 billion it recently sent to state and local governments for budget deficits that no longer exist. Reducing discretionary spending by 1.5 percent this year would also free up $500 billion over the decade.

Conservatives should not return to the “Democrat-lite” days when they stood for growing the government and bureaucracy at a slightly slower rate than the Democrats. Nor should they accept a budget deal without an ironclad assurance that it will not be shredded before the ink is dry.

 

 

Brian Riedl is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on twitter @Brian_Riedl

 

Read more:

https://nypost.com/2021/06/24/gop-is-being-fooled-by-this-infrastructure-deal/

 

 

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petrol included...

 

THE SENATE’S NEW bipartisan infrastructure bill is being sold as a down payment on addressing the climate crisis. But environmental advocates and academics are warning the proposed spending bill is full of new fossil fuel industry subsidies masked as climate solutions. The latest draft bill would make fossil fuel companies eligible for at least $25 billion in new subsidies, according to an analysis by the Center for International Environmental Law.

 

“This is billions upon billions of dollars in additional fossil fuel industry subsidies in addition to the $15 billion that we already hand out to this industry to support and fund this industry,” said Jim Walsh, Food and Water Watch’s senior policy analyst. Scientists say that to meet the goals of the international Paris climate accord, the U.S would need to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 — and be well on the way there by 2030. With subsidies that keep fossil fuel industries going, Walsh said, “We will never be able to meet the Paris agreement if we fund these kind of programs.”

 

Just as concerning is the new economy the subsidies could entrench, said Walsh, through the creation of new fossil fuel infrastructure. “This would support the development of four petrochemical hubs that would create profit incentives for greenhouse gas emission production and would be focused on finding new ways of integrating fossil fuels into our economy for transportation, energy, petrochemical development, and plastics.”

In short, he added, “This deal envisions a world where we will use fossil fuels into perpetuity.”

Industry-Backed “Climate” Projects

The subsidies would go toward technologies sold as dream fixes for ending the nightmare of the climate crisis without the colossal political hurdle of dislodging the fossil fuel industry from the U.S. economy. Such technologies include carbon capture and decarbonized hydrogen fuel. Both purported solutions in practice help fossil fuel companies mask the continued release of climate-warming gases. Neither of the technologies are currently commercially viable at a large scale, so the energy industry requires government help to carry out what critics see as a public relations scheme.

The bill includes billions of dollars for carbon capture, utilization, and storage; hydrogen fuel made from natural gas; and “low emissions buses” that could run on fuels including hydrogen and natural gas. It also encourages subsidies that go unquantified in the legislation, for example urging states to waive property taxes for pipelines to transport captured carbon.

The devil is in the details. The vast majority of clean-sounding hydrogen is made from natural gas and produces the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide as a waste product. The process itself requires energy, typically supplied by burning more natural gas, which also produces greenhouse gases. Meanwhile, carbon capture and storage are promoted primarily as a means to clean up continued emissions from fossil fuel processing facilities. Carbon capture would do nothing to resolve the array of severe environmental problems caused upstream by drilling, fracking, and mining — let alone the downstream burning of the fuels for energy.

The survival of the fossil fuel industry depends on its ability to convince the public that corporations are taking steps to address the climate crisis. Hydrogen and carbon capture, utilization, and storage have been two of the industry’s key strategies for achieving that goal. Exxon MobilRoyal Dutch Shell, and Chevron, just to name a few, have touted their investments in hydrogen and carbon capture.

 

While long-shot, industry-supported “climate” projects depend on government subsidies, so does the rapid scale-up of renewable energy sources already proven to meaningfully slow down the spiraling climate crisis. Put simply, wind and solar work as climate fixes right now, while carbon capture and “decarbonized” hydrogen do not.

Yet the Democrats and Republicans pushing the infrastructure compromise are choosing to give the fossil fuel industry a lifeline instead of providing funding for proven renewable energy technology. Even bill provisions that facilitate renewable energy development contain language that could allow funds to go instead to fossil fuel industry “solutions.”

 

Read more

https://theintercept.com/2021/08/03/bipartisan-infrastructure-bill-climate-subsidies-fossil-fuel/

 

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the teleprompter says...

Biden Finds a Bipartisan Victory, but Democratic Unity May Prove More Elusive

 

 

The Senate’s convincing passage of a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan was vindication of President Biden’s commitment to bipartisanship, but to make it law, he will need Democrats in lock step.

WASHINGTON — The Senate’s passage on Tuesday of a trillion-dollar infrastructure package may have been a vote of confidence for President Biden and his insistence that bipartisanship can still thrive, but there is a far harder task ahead for his agenda: keeping Democrats in lock step.

The crosscurrents in the president’s own party have only sharpened since Congress began moving on parallel tracks with two separate legislative efforts. One, a $1 trillion bipartisan measure that the Senate passed Tuesday, would pay for roads, bridges, rail and water systems. The other, a budget blueprint the Senate was expected to pass late Tuesday or early Wednesday, would come together this fall to expand the nation’s social safety net — education, health care, child care and climate change — with Democratic votes only.

It will fall to the president to keep his fractious party in line and both efforts moving forward.

“I would liken it to air traffic control,” Representative Tom Malinowski, Democrat of New Jersey, said on Tuesday. “We have at least a couple of planes circling the airport in stormy weather, and everyone wants to see their loved ones on the ground. But the important thing is to get everyone down safely. In what order and at what time best assures that, that’s the challenge.”

Mr. Biden, he said, will be “absolutely critical.”

In an evenly divided Senate and a narrowly divided House, the path for Mr. Biden’s agenda is treacherous. It is remarkable that his expansive social and economic proposals — all $4 trillion of them — have gotten this far, and the two chambers’ Democratic leaders, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer, have proved adept at holding their caucuses together.

But the party’s left wing is smarting, feeling like infrastructure has been given preferential treatment to its priorities and losing a hard-fought special election in Cleveland to a handpicked representative of the Democratic establishment, Shontel Brown, who beat Nina Turner, a hero of progressives.

Mr. Biden used a speech after the Senate vote not only to trumpet the bipartisan package but to shift focus to the Democrats needed to pass the $3.5 trillion social policy bill, which has to be approved under a budget process called reconciliation to sidestep Republican opposition.

“I think we will get enough Democrats to vote for it,” Mr. Biden said, adding, “and I think that the House will eventually put two bills on my desk, one on infrastructure, and one on reconciliation.”

“For the Republicans who supported this bill, you showed a lot of courage,” Mr. Biden said. “To the Democrats who supported this bill, we can be proud.”

Liberal Democrats never bought into one of the premises of the Biden campaign, that moderation, at least in temperament, could soften reflexive Republican opposition to everything a Democratic president proposes and begin to mend the country’s divisions. Instead they championed his policy agenda, which was unabashedly liberal and expansive.

 

Read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/10/us/politics/biden-democrats-infrastructure.html

 

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the deal is on...

The US Congress has passed a landmark $1tn (£741bn) infrastructure spending package, delivering a major domestic win to President Joe Biden.

Negotiations over the sweeping public works bill - which passed the House of Representatives with 228-206 vote - created a bitter split among Democrats.

Meanwhile the House is moving forward with a more ambitious social spending bill favoured by liberal lawmakers.

The infrastructure package now heads to Mr Biden's desk to be signed into law.

Billed as a "once-in-a-generation" spending measure, the infrastructure legislation proposes $550bn in new federal expenditure, over the next eight years, to upgrade highways, roads and bridges, and to modernise city transit systems and passenger rail networks.

The agreement also sets aside funding for clean drinking water, high speed internet, and a nationwide network of electric vehicle charging points.

 

It is the largest federal investment in the country's infrastructure for decades.

"Tonight, we took a monumental step forward as a nation," Mr Biden said in a statement. "Generations from now, people will look back and know this is when America won the economic competition for the 21st Century."

It will be financed in several ways, including unspent emergency relief funds from the Covid pandemic.

Its passage marks a huge achievement for the Biden administration amid low approval ratings and a defeat for the Democrats in Virginia's gubernatorial election this week.

Three months ago, 19 Republicans joined with Democrats to approve the legislation in the evenly split Senate, a rare bipartisan feat in an increasingly divided Congress.

On Friday the bill passed the House with support from 13 Republicans, too. But more liberal lawmakers balked at its final version, complaining that key liberal policies had been dropped in exchange for the bipartisan win. 

 

Six Democrats voted against it, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. The group of six - dubbed The Squad - are among the most left-wing and progressive members of the House.

 

Read more: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-59180745

 

 

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key negotiations...

 

 

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shoddystructural...

 

By Ralph Vartabedian

  • Nov. 28, 2021     Updated 4:28 p.m. ET

As Honolulu sprawled into new suburbs west of Pearl Harbor over the last two decades, city planners proposed an ambitious rail transit line that would sweep riders 20 miles into downtown. The $4 billion estimate in 2006 was hardly cheap, amounting to $200 million per mile.

The cost escalation since then has been an engineering marvel all its own. Concerns over Native Hawaiian burial grounds stalled early construction, then problems with welding and cracks in the tracks appeared. Earlier this year, engineers realized that in some sections, the wheels were a half-inch narrower than the rails. Order new wheels? Tear up the tracks?

The launch dates slipped forward and the cost estimates crept upward — at latest count, $11.4 billion, with a target completion date of 2031.

Honolulu’s tribulations are far from a lone cautionary tale. To the contrary, they signal the kind of cost overruns, engineering challenges and political obstacles that have made it all but impossible to complete a major, multibillion-dollar infrastructure project in the United States on budget and on schedule over the past decade.

 

As the nation sets out on a national spending spree fueled by the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill signed by President Biden this month, the job ahead carries enormous risks that the projects will face the same kind of cost, schedule and technical problems that have hobbled ambitious efforts from New York to Seattle, delaying benefits to the public and driving up the price tag that taxpayers ultimately will bear.

 

American cities and states were long renowned for some of the greatest bridges, water systems and freeways in the world, but challenges have grown more potent. Agencies have less internal technical talent. Legal challenges have grown stronger under state and federal environmental laws. And spending on infrastructure as a fraction of the economy has shrunk, giving local agencies less experience in modern practices.

The $1.2 trillion package has bold goals, directing the majority of $500 billion to highways, $39 billion to urban transit, $65 billion to broadband projects and $73 billion to electrical grids, among other items. The nation’s busiest passenger rail line, Amtrak’s Boston-to-Washington corridor, would get the biggest slice of a $66 billion rail package. The infrastructure spending plan is unlikely to rescue some existing infrastructure projects that are bogged down with problems.

And even with the new infusion of money, analysts say it will be tough to ramp up infrastructure progress as swiftly as envisioned in the current timetable.

 

The construction industry is facing sharply growing costs for steel products, up by 142 percent in the last 12 months, and other key materials. Shortages of skilled labor are worsening, exacerbated by Covid-induced retirements.

“A lot of people would like to see the money quickly spent,” said Anirban Basu, chief economist of Associated Builders and Contractors, a construction industry trade group. “They are going to look at the costs they are facing and extend out the projects because of constraints.”

Bent Flyvbjerg, a professor at the University of Oxford who has studied scores of projects around the world, found that 92 percent of them overran their original cost and schedule estimates, often by large margins — in part, he said, because cost estimates are “systematically and significantly deceptive.”

“A lot of projects are not delivering what they promised to deliver,” he said.

In Baltimore this month, Mr. Biden lamented that U.S. infrastructure was once rated the world’s best and now, “You know what we rank in infrastructure? Thirteenth in the world.

In some cases, U.S. construction costs are higher than those in Western Europe and democratic nations in Asia, according to an upcoming University of California, Berkeley, analysis, said Ethan Elkind, a law professor and director of the school’s climate program.

“It is a lot harder to build projects here, and we are not as skilled at doing it,” he said.

When California voters approved a bond in 2008 for a high-speed rail system from Los Angeles to San Francisco, the project was supposed to cost $33 billion and be completed by 2020. The job is now projected to finish in 2033 for $100 billion, though those estimates are dated and there is an $80 billion funding gap.

 

The ambitious project, the nation’s most serious effort to build a full-scale bullet train, has encountered serious delays because of land acquisition issues, environmental litigation, permit setbacks, employee turnover and significant design changes. The problems have triggered political infighting even with the Democratic supermajority in California.

 

Lengthy delays have also affected New York’s East Side Access extension of the Long Island Rail Road, which is supposed to cut up to 40 minutes off commuter time on the last segment, from Queens to Grand Central Terminal, with up to 24 trains per hour at peak times.

Conceived more than a half century ago, with a construction contract awarded in 2006, that project was supposed to be completed by 2011. Early estimates put the cost at $2.2 billion, then $4.3 billion in 2006 and $6.4 billion in 2008. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority now envisions completion in December 2022 at a cost of $11.1 billion. Design changes, underground tunneling problems and coordination with other agencies were some of the factors in the delays and cost increases.

One of the nation’s most important environmental infrastructure projects, and perhaps the most technically difficult one, has been underway in Central Washington State for decades at the former Hanford nuclear weapons site. Since 2013, major construction has been stopped at two partially built plants to treat and vitrify 56 million gallons of radioactive sludge.

When an independent review in 2015 found 362 significant design problems, the Energy Department announced a 17-year delay and estimated the system would become fully operational in 2036.

The problems included the failure to anticipate the potential for an earthquake to damage equipment and the possibility that the chemical processes to separate high-level radioactive materials could cause explosive hydrogen gas to form.

The delays have pushed the Energy Department to adopt an alternative that would start treating low-level waste by the end of 2023, Washington State officials said. The last cost estimate for the plant was $17 billion, up from $12.3 billion in 2013 and about $4 billion 20 years ago.

 

The rail project in Hawaii was intended to relieve congestion on a par with Los Angeles along the urban band from East Kapolei to the core of Honolulu.

The Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation believes it can address the latest track problems by welding certain sections of track and later replacing wheels to match the track size, said a spokesman, Harry Cho.

The setbacks that resulted in delays — archaeological surveys, labor costs, utility relocations and land acquisition — are the kind of challenges that plague nearly all major infrastructure projects; the common mistake is in not planning and budgeting for them, said Joseph Schofer, a Northwestern University civil engineer and originator of the “Infrastructure Show” podcast.

 

Read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/28/us/infrastructure-megaprojects.html

 

 

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key negotiations...

 

 

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