Late Friday night U.S. Congressmen passed a long-awaited Bipartisan Infrastructure bill. “The infrastructure package contains $550 billion in entirely new investments, including money for electric-car charging stations and zero-emission school buses,” reports the Washington Post.
“The spending is mostly paid for — without raising taxes. The bulk of the funding comes from repurposing unspent coronavirus relief money and tightening enforcement on reporting gains from cryptocurrency investments.”
An additional $65 billion will fund broadband Internet, with new statements on the White House web site hailing the bill as “a once-in-a-generation investment in our nation’s infrastructure and competitiveness” and “the largest investment in public transit in U.S. history.”
This Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal will rebuild America’s roads, bridges and rails, expand access to clean drinking water, ensure every American has access to high-speed internet, tackle the climate crisis, advance environmental justice, and invest in communities that have too often been left behind. The legislation will help ease inflationary pressures and strengthen supply chains by making long overdue improvements for our nation’s ports, airports, rail, and roads. It will drive the creation of good-paying union jobs and grow the economy sustainably and equitably so that everyone gets ahead for decades to come. Combined with the President’s Build Back Framework, it will add on average 1.5 million jobs per year for the next 10 years.
Or, as U.S. president Biden said in his own statement, the newly-passed bill “will create millions of jobs, turn the climate crisis into an opportunity, and put us on a path to win the economic competition of the 21st Century.”
To address the climate crisis, the legislation “will upgrade our power infrastructure, by building thousands of miles of new, resilient transmission lines to facilitate the expansion of renewables and clean energy, while lowering costs,” according to the White House’s statement. “And it will fund new programs to support the development, demonstration, and deployment of cutting-edge clean energy technologies to accelerate our transition to a zero-emission economy.”
More specifics from the White House: “Millions of Americans feel the effects of climate change each year when their roads wash out, power goes down, or schools get flooded. Last year alone, the United States faced 22 extreme weather and climate-related disaster events with losses exceeding $1 billion each — a cumulative price tag of nearly $100 billion…. The legislation makes our communities safer and our infrastructure more resilient to the impacts of climate change and cyber-attacks, with an investment of over $50 billion to protect against droughts, heat, floods and wildfires, in addition to a major investment in weatherization. The legislation is the largest investment in the resilience of physical and natural systems in American history.”
“In thousands of rural and urban communities around the country, hundreds of thousands of former industrial and energy sites are now idle — sources of blight and pollution. Proximity to a Superfund site can lead to elevated levels of lead in children’s blood. The bill will invest $21 billion clean up Superfund and brownfield sites, reclaim abandoned mine …read more
Source:: Slashdot