Bad Government

Americans have failed to recognize the costs of bad government.  Bad government is government that fails to protect citizens from unexpected calamity.  Te best example of bad government today is the failure to recognize the perils of climate change.  Politicians dependent upon lobbyists from the fossil fuel industry continue to deny the existence of climate change, even when faced with the risks posed by increasingly extreme weather to America’s aging infrastructure that occurred across the country.  The past week’s continent-spanning winter storms triggered blackouts in Texas, Oklahoma, Mississippi and several other states. One-third of oil production in the nation was halted. Drinking-water systems in Ohio were knocked offline. Road networks nationwide were paralyzed and vaccination efforts in 20 states were disrupted.  The crisis carries a profound warning. As climate change brings more frequent and intense storms, floods, heat waves, wildfires and other extreme events, it is placing growing stress on the foundations of the country’s economy: Its network of roads and railways, drinking-water systems, power plants, electrical grids, industrial waste sites and even homes. Failures in just one sector can set off a domino effect of breakdowns in hard-to-predict ways.  Much of this infrastructure was built decades ago, under the expectation that the environment around it would remain stable, or at least fluctuates within predictable bounds. Now climate change is upending that assumption.  While it’s not always possible to say precisely how global warming influenced any one particular storm, scientists said, an overall rise in extreme weather creates sweeping new risks.  Sewer systems are overflowing more often as powerful rainstorms exceed their design capacity. Coastal homes and highways are collapsing as intensified runoff erodes cliffs. Coal ash, the toxic residue produced by coal-burning plants, is spilling into rivers as floods overwhelm barriers meant to hold it back. Homes once beyond the reach of wildfires are burning in blazes they were never designed to withstand.   Problems like these often reflect an inclination of governments to spend as little money as possible because that is the characteristic of bad government...fail to acknowledge the need and failure to spend the necessary funds to counteract the need.  “Building resilient and sustainable infrastructure that can withstand extreme weather and a changing climate will play an integral role in creating millions of good paying, union jobs” while cutting greenhouse gas emissions.  And while President Biden has called for a major push to refurbish and upgrade the nation’s infrastructure, getting a closely divided Congress to spend hundreds of billions, if not trillions of dollars, will be a major challenge.  And, the biggest failure will be the failure to recognize the extent the costs of ignoring the need will cost even more trillions.  That is exactly how government becomes bad government, government catering to special interests at the expense of government preventing problems like those the nation is presently experiencing.