Abstract
Building infrastructure is hard; building a trillion dollars’ worth of infrastructure within a decade, while jump-starting U.S. manufacturing and protecting fragile ecosystems, is harder still. But if President Biden’s climate finance windfall is to position the United States to lead on clean-energy jobs, trade and innovation, that building needs to start now.
The bottlenecks are at the state and local levels. Not-in-my-backyard objections; years-long environmental reviews; and the kind of cost overruns and underperformance that have resulted in a decades-long slump in productivity in the U.S. construction sector. The hundreds of billions of dollars released by the Inflation Reduction Act, the bipartisan infrastructure law, and the Chips and Science Act will clear some of this.
As to the rest of the choke points? There are three options.