Hate to be glib, but this "if it were possible, someone would've done it" thinking is exactly why we're stuck. Your reasons sound smart. Well-reasoned. Totally rational. And they're missing something fundamental.
Know what 4% annual growth looked like from the 40s to the 70s? We doubled Americans' quality of life every 18 years - by building impossible things. The Hoover Dam? "Too big, too expensive." The Interstate Highway System? "Economically unfeasible." California's entire water system? "The requirements are insane!" They all got built anyway.
You're missing that there could be three hundred million more people working on this. That's a lot of clever Americans who could be solving water engineering and energy problems instead of writing HN comments about why it's too hard.
Don't be another NIMBY sad sack who's been rationalizing American decline since 1969. We used to build impossible things that transformed how people lived. Now we write elegant essays about why new infrastructure can't work, citing books about how hard the old infrastructure was to build - infrastructure we somehow built anyway.
Want that back? Stop listing why it's impossible and start asking how we do it anyway.
I think you underestimate how much larger of a task terraforming the USA west is then say building a rail network through the US (which was an impressive feat) or building hoover dam(also impressive). Not only that the issue with terraforming the West is you are pulling sooo many resources away from productive uses into low value uses.
The American productivity and growth in the past were all large projects that reaped significant benefits of productivity.
Sometimes big projects are great ideas, sometimes they are well intentioned but bad ideas.
Don't worry theres no shortage of dreamers in America -- some of those dreams are great but not all of them.
Also trying to muscle through reasonable questions by trying to label them as some kind of Nimby sad sack is a poor strategy to influence people.
In a way, you’re right. But of course the reason there are so many onerous regulations is because the market has demonstrated an inability to do this kind of thorough analysis itself prior to inflicting vast negative externalities on the commons.
Not that all of these regulations are perfect/necessary/ultimately good, but they’re not coming out of nowhere. There’s no one in some dingy room with filing cabinets dreaming up ways they can “slow down progress” for the fun of it.
Their analysis looks far more thorough than TFA or yours. Will patiently await a yet more thorough analysis that shows it is worth doing though, let me know if you find one.
The Limits to Growth and The Population Bomb were published in the early 1970s. These books convinced many developed world politicians to put a break on almost all large scale infrastructure projects. Slowly the ideas of degrowth and depopulation have been pushed through many areas of society and culture.
One small exception, the sudden U-turn on nuclear power last month after 40 years of not building a nuke plant was only made possible by the dire need to beat China in the AI military race. Little of that power will go to civilian use and will be used to power massive data centers.
The failure to build hi-speed rail in the United States is a huge contrast to the non-stop obsession with climate change legislation, administrative agency activities and diplomacy that go on. It's so boring that nobody reports on it, but since I follow the energy sector I get the news alerts and there are non-stop climate negotiations, policy making and legislative pushes and so forth to do everything possible to implement the Limits to Growth and Net Zero 2050 agenda. Voters rank it fairly low on their list of issues they are concerned about though.
If you want to get really dark, there's this guy who's been popular in left of center intellectual publications pushing "Degrowth Communism" which is like communism but there is no prosperity for workers, just endless lowered standards of living to save the planet.
I feel your sentiment for sure but this is unfair criticism of the top post. Bold claims need proof.
To me it harkens back to the whole hyperloop thing which was such a disappointment that I am very skeptical of details. Doesn’t mean it’s not possible of course!
This can be summed up with “physics isn’t real, we just need some American ingenuity.” Very similar to the argument given by the guy who ignored all engineers and made his own submersible out of carbon fiber.
Know what 4% annual growth looked like from the 40s to the 70s? We doubled Americans' quality of life every 18 years - by building impossible things. The Hoover Dam? "Too big, too expensive." The Interstate Highway System? "Economically unfeasible." California's entire water system? "The requirements are insane!" They all got built anyway.
You're missing that there could be three hundred million more people working on this. That's a lot of clever Americans who could be solving water engineering and energy problems instead of writing HN comments about why it's too hard.
Don't be another NIMBY sad sack who's been rationalizing American decline since 1969. We used to build impossible things that transformed how people lived. Now we write elegant essays about why new infrastructure can't work, citing books about how hard the old infrastructure was to build - infrastructure we somehow built anyway.
Want that back? Stop listing why it's impossible and start asking how we do it anyway.