The Infrastructure Bill Uses A Crafty New Buzzword: ‘Climate Resilience’

These are the two buried headlines regarding the just-signed Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (aka “the $1.5 trillion infrastructure bill”).

The first story nobody is talking about is the curious migration of climate nomenclature from “climate change” to “climate resilience.”

The second story nobody is talking about is the $270 billion that has been earmarked for so-called “climate resilience”. We might refer to it as “pork” or “subsidies”, but the fact is that it is money being thrown at the same con artists behind the climate movement.

We must not dismiss the change in terminology. Climate “change” has always been a vague term that can be challenged by opponents, usually by pointing out that the “change” in Earth’s temperature is not significant enough to warrant hysteria.

Congress and the Climate Alarmists have gotten progressively craftier in the use of language. Here’s how “resilience” is officially defined in Section 11103.(4) of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act:

The term `resilience’, with respect to a project, means a project with the ability to anticipate, prepare for, or adapt to conditions or withstand, respond to, or recover rapidly from disruptions, including the ability-to resist hazards or withstand impacts from weather events and natural disasters; or to reduce the magnitude or duration of impacts of a disruptive weather event or natural disaster on a project; and to have the absorptive capacity, adaptive capacity, and recoverability to decrease project vulnerability to weather events or other natural disasters.

This is insidiously brilliant. By simultaneously using a more specific term, it permits the government to broaden the arenas to which grants can be made.

The bill does not contain language that limits or further defines these terms, which means just about anything goes as long as it can be related to making any form of infrastructure more “resilient.”

When one digs into the specifics of Section 11405 of the bill, which is subtitled “The Promoting Resilient Operations for Transformative, Efficient, and Cost-saving Transportation program’ or the “PROTECT program,” it mostly involves anything having to do with roads, water, and drainage.

The language again demonstrates how it’s a big giveaway to the climate alarmists, because “eligible activities” for the grants include increasing “the resilience of surface transportation infrastructure from the impacts of changing conditions, such as sea-level rise [and] flooding…”

Sixteen approved activities are listed, but the seventeenth is where things become a free-for-all, because “any other protective features, including natural infrastructure, as determined by the Secretary” are included.

That is, the money goes to wherever the Biden Administration wants it to go.

Here’s where some of the rest of the billions are going.

• Section 11401 of the bill permits any public authority to obtain grants to deploy publicly accessible electric vehicle charging; or hydrogen, propane, or natural gas fueling infrastructure “along designated alternative fuel corridors.” So if your local authority wants money, they’d better become an “alternative fuel corridor,” which can only be decided by bureaucrats within the Department of Transportation.
• Section 11402 of the bill offers grants to fund the reduction of emissions at port facilities, which mysteriously includes projects that replace street lighting and traffic lights with “energy-efficient alternatives,” and gives favoritism to any project that supports the deployment of alternative fuel vehicles.
• As much as we all hate traffic, we might hate Section 11404 of the bill, subtitled the “Congestion Relief Program,” which earmarks billions of dollars for any urban area with more than a million people “to reduce highway congestion, reduce economic and environmental costs associated with that congestion, including transportation emissions, and optimize existing highway capacity and usage of highway and transit systems…”

Yet this goes beyond just improving highways. The government specifies that grants will be given to reduce or shift highway use to off-peak travel times, institute more toll roads, more of those pointless HOV lanes, and increase the cost of parking.

Also, just as you may have heard, there will be grants offered to develop systems for “congestion pricing.” The minimum grant in this portion of the bill is ten million dollars.

But don’t worry, any projects approved “may include mitigation measures to deal with any potential adverse financial effects on low-income drivers.”

• Section 11406 establishes $500 million in grants over the next five years for the “Healthy Streets Program.” This one is so specific that the lobbyists and grifters who managed to get it included should win awards for originality. To “mitigate urban heat islands” and “heat impacts to infrastructure and road users,” these grants will be used first to “conduct a comprehensive tree canopy assessment,” which includes conducting an inventory of the “location, species, condition, and health of existing tree canopies and trees on public facilities,” to determine which trees should be replaced or added.

Not detailed enough? It gets worse. These assessments should then be compared to those assessments done in low-income and disadvantaged communities for the sake of “equity.”

Once all that is done, the heat island hot spots will be presumably cooled down by the installation of – ready? – “cool pavement.” What is “cool pavement”? That which has a reflective surface with higher reflectivity to decrease its surface temperature.

Reflectivity is also known as “albedo” which naturally relates to climate change… er… I mean, climate resilience.

If one checks out the usual suspects in the world of climate change, it’s easy to see that they all supported the bill. What’s distressing is that 13 Republicans also supported the bill.

Several of them claimed that voting for this bill would hamstring the Democrats from getting the $3.5 trillion Build Back Better bill passed. Fat chance.

As usual, a little research demonstrates why some of these politicians voted for the bill.

Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania was the top recipient of donations from transportation unions.

Rep. Don Bacon’s district in Nebraska includes one of the designated alternative fuel corridors mentioned above.

Marathon Energy, a natural gas supplier, was the top donor to Rep. Nicole Malliotakis of New York’s 11th District. The list goes on and on.

The good news is that any other hogs who want to get into this line of work should have job security for a very long time. There’s plenty of money sloshing around the pigsties. It just happens to belong to the rest of us.

Read more at The Pipeline