The New Year is now a little over a week old and the inauguration of the 45th President of the United States is just around the corner. And while some are still dwelling on 2016 (we offered our post mortem at the end of the year), the time has come to look at what’s in store.
One of the key buzzwords, particularly if you’re looking for an issue that transcends party lines these days is “infrastructure” – an area where broad consensus on the need for significant overhaul exists. What is often overlooked, however, is that our infrastructure today comprises of far more than just bridges, roads, and tunnels. As our very own Daniel McGroarty outlines in a brand new piece for Investor’s Business Daily,
“[t]oday, our infrastructure extends to the national power grid — currently a patchwork of lines, nodes and often antique switching towers we rely on to move energy to where we need it — to the internet itself, which has a physicality we easily overlook in this Age of the Cloud and Wireless. These systems, marvels that they are, come closer to tin-can-and-string contraptions than the modern version we would build if we began the work today.
Threats against our infrastructure are as diverse as they are real, and dealing with them will require a comprehensive approach. Securing access to Copper, Graphite, Cobalt, Manganese, and Rhenium may not be the first things that come to mind when we think critical infrastructure protection – but they, and many other tech metals and minerals, have to be on our shopping list if we’re serious about a 21st Century infrastructure that is competitive and can withstand threats from the outside and within.
As followers of ARPN are aware, we are subject to a significant degree of import-dependence for the above referenced materials, as well as for many others. With there being more to infrastructure than “cement trucks and Jersey Barriers”, it’s time for an approach conducive to unleashing our arguably vast domestic mineral potential.
Explains McGroarty:
“It means getting over the pernicious mindset that 2017 America lives in a postindustrial age, a time when Americans are all ‘symbolic analysts,’ tapping away at keyboards, creating wealth from ones-and-zeros, live-blogging streaming video and the like, no longer dependent of transforming real raw materials into things. That messy business has been off-shored to other places, happy to sell us what we need.”
This leaves us at the mercy of the rest of the world — and needlessly so. Concludes McGroarty:
“Word is that the new infrastructure bill will exceed $1 trillion. Shoring up our infrastructure — broadly understood — is essential, and not just for jobs and GDP, but for the stuff modern dreams are made of — everything from the gadgets we use to occupy our time to the high-performance materials that power the weapons platforms that keep us safe.
If we approach the Great Infrastructure Debate in this spirit, we could do even more than rebuild our roads, bridges and tunnels. We could build the foundation for a new American Century.”
