[#3]The Red Queen Race: Infrastructure and Economic (In)efficiency
Part 1 — Hardening and Replacing We’ve Got
[Excerpt from upcoming book — It’s Getting Hot in Here: Reflections of a climate hawk grappling with the inevitable]
“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else — if you run very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”
“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”
In normal times we invest in infrastructure — public or private — to increase economic activity or better the human condition. We build highways to increase inter-city traffic. New roads open areas to development. Railways and transit make transportation more efficient. Expanded airports widen doors for global travellers, and shipping ports boost trade. Bigger factories make more stuff, and new hospitals treat more patients and increase well-being. Transmission lines power our lives, as do pipelines, refineries and nuclear plants. Schools make us smarter, more productive, better citizens. Investments in science increase our understanding and underpin future technologies that, in turn, make new markets and increase productivity.
In raw financial terms: infrastructure investments — from schools to concrete — have positive returns.
It’s been a similar narrative for centuries: we invest to be wealthier, healthier, more productive. Progress and infrastructure have been partners throughout human history. Successive generations inherit, and improve on, investments of the past.
These are not normal times. Bad Warming means we’ll need to invest just keep some of what we’ve got and abandon a lot of the rest. This implies zero, or negative, returns. We can predict a lot of the zero-return stuff: flood barriers to slow rising seas, rebuilt highways after flooding and homes after fires. Negative returns hit as we abandon coastlines, give up on dried out agricultural land, or pay to suck all that excess carbon out of the air (a growing — and controversial — industry called ‘direct air capture’ — more on that later). There will be lots of nasty surprises.
Part 1 — Hardening and Replacing We’ve Got
In July 2022, just a few months after Russia invaded Ukraine and European militaries were skittish, a heat wave engulfed much of Europe. Temperatures topped 40C in many places. The British RAF reported the tarmac at Brize Norton airbase had softened, making it impossible for military flights to land or take off. Brize Norton is Britain’s largest, home to the RAF’s Strategic and Tactical Air Transport and Air-to-Air Refueling Forces. Amid breathless reporting of ‘melted tarmac’ the RAF stayed calm and carried on, reporting “During this period of extreme temperature…aircraft are using alternative airfields in line with a long-established plan…there is no impact on RAF operations”.
The RAF was prepared for those few hot days, and I’m certain they’ve planned for longer and more intense heat waves at times of extreme tension. It’s not the first time the military took a climate hit. In 2018 Hurricane Michael blasted Florida’s Tyndall Air Force Base, causing an estimated $4.7 billion in damage and rendering unfit 17 of the 55 Raptor stealth jets stationed there. All that stuff will get rebuilt, and future bases made stronger. The cost of hardening military infrastructure will be absorbed into military budgets, passed on to civic society as increased tax burdens or manifest through difficult (but opaque) trade-offs — perhaps having less arms to provide Ukraine. Either way, as the military absorbs the cost of climate resilience it will be largely hidden from view as the security it provides gets more expensive, less effective or both.
The image of fighter jets grounded at a super-heated military air base while Russian tanks rolled across Europe was a particularly potent reminder that our infrastructure was not built to withstand Bad Warming. And it’s not just the obvious fires, floods and droughts — bad as they are. Melting runways that ground military aircraft hint we must anticipate risk throughout our physical infrastructure, from power plants to airports, train tracks to agriculture.
The costs to civic infrastructure from the same heatwave popped up for all to see. Airports across the UK faced similar problems. Luton, just north of London, grounded flights due to a ‘heat defect’. Trains across the continent rolled more slowly as tracks heated up. Some in Britain ground to a halt, as London’s Underground warned people not to use trains unless absolutely necessary. Electrical grids got stressed as air-conditioning demand spiked, while at the same time transmission lines sagged under heat stress, limiting the power they could move. Nuclear plants across France curtailed output because the intake water was too warm for cooling. Now imagine all the stuff that will stop working as we approach 3C.
We’ll need to respond in three ways: rebuild damaged infrastructure, harden existing systems, and abandon or replace assets we can’t adequately protect. Some costs will hit the insurance industry (who will pass them on to business and consumers), some the public purse (passed on to taxpayers) and much direct to individuals and corporations. None add to productive economic activity, but at best protect what we already have. All that effort to stay in one place, just like the Red Queen.
We’ve already had to rebuild climate-damaged infrastructure. Here in Canada, repairs to the Coquihalla and Fraser Canyon highways in BC after the 2021 floods will top a billion dollars. Recovery costs from the 2016 Fort McMurray fire, which burned more than a million acres, were nearly $10 billion. The Calgary floods back in 2013 cost about $5 billion. New York recovered from Hurricane Sandy at a cost of around $70 billion. Globally, flood damage is expected to top $700 billion annually by 2030. We can expect Bad Warming to increase these numbers by an order of magnitude, so a good guess is a global cost of well over a trillion dollars annually.
Hardening existing systems has barely begun. A few basements in Calgary and Toronto are better protected after flooding. New York plans to spend $52 billion on surge protection in its harbour, in the form of twelve moveable sea barriers. London is relatively well off, as the Thames Barrier can efficiently block surges from the North Sea along the relatively narrow River Thames. All bets are off, however, if sea rise hits the long tail, overpowering all these efforts. We harden in anticipation for one level of warming, then again as it gets worse, and so on. Building for climate risk today means anticipating it many decades from now. The past is no guide.
As the train stoppage and over-heated nukes in Europe remind us, we need to harden all our infrastructure. The US has a quarter of a million kilometers of rail transport systems, Canada a fifth of that. Replacing the steel in the US system would cost about $20 billion . Highways are regularly re-paved, so we can harden those as part of regular asset renewal. Few Canadian nukes rely on warming rivers for cooling, so we’re better off on that front than France, though we’ll likely need to increase the amount of water plants like Bruce Power on Lake Ontario are allowed to use for cooling.
Floods and fires are one thing, droughts another. It’s not easy to see how one hardens the US Southwest as the Colorado River dries up. China’s unique ambition to move water from southern rivers to the north of the country by 2050 (the South-to-North Water Diversion Project) is mind boggling in scope, the largest of its kind ever undertaken at a cost of nearly $100 billion. Perhaps the US tries something similar. If so, Canada might want to keep a close eye on the Great Lakes, since the sheer volume of water is not indicative of sustainable flows but an illusion — akin to ‘mining’ water like the depleted aquifers in the US Southwest (see Canada Water Wars). Again, all that work to move water just to keep things as they are, not make them better.
It’s one thing to react to a catastrophe and dig in, it’s another to slowly realize the inevitable and jump ship.
Next up: Abandoning Assets.
