Why can’t we build anything anymore? Seven billion people need infrastructure, get over it

We are heading for a big collision between two huge and opposing forces. On one hand we want everything, and we want it cheap, safe, environmentally friendly, and right now. On the other, vested interests always seem to jam a stick in the spokes of progress for subjective and highly personal reasons, which custom now demands that everyone respect.

Something has to give somewhere.

At its most obvious, this problem is easiest illustrated by the problems associated with construction of pipelines and other energy infrastructure like natural gas export terminals. In Canada, the repercussions are beyond serious, because Canada is a resource-based economy – like it or not. The contributions of the energy sector to the national economy are hard to overestimate.

It’s not just energy projects though, and it’s not just about the environment (though that’s the official line of all opponents). It’s a protest mentality gone wild, so commonplace it’s now taken for granted. It is a rarity to see any new infrastructure get any sort of welcome, no matter how important it is to our standard of living.

Environmentalists can’t claim the moral high ground; sometimes they’re fighting some of the most progressive energy installations out there. Various bands of me-firsters are fighting power lines because of the impacts on agriculture and tourism (hard to imagine). They are fighting solar installations because they harm local ecosystems or make them less beautiful  (random excuses), fry birds (now it’s getting interesting) or even possibly because “solar farms would suck up all the energy from the sun” (we have landed on Mars).

OK, the wacko news stories linked above are all fringe, or slightly beyond, but that’s the point. As ridiculous as these stories sound, they work – in the Roanoke-Chowan news story, the solar farm was successfully blocked, and the half-wit loons on town council went on to ban all future solar farms. Everywhere we look facts, usefulness, and large-scale strategic importance take a backseat to wingnut theories, worst-case scenarios, or just outright fabrications – such as stating that diluted bitumen is more corrosive than good old black crude.

It never ends. Massive projects that can add meaningful amounts to a nation’s gross national product are derailed by local Janjaweed equivalents, who instead of torching villages torch anything that upsets their little vision of how the world should be.

Seven billion people require reasonably priced energy to survive. Energy is harvested in places of abundance, and transported to areas of scarcity. You want to stop that? Tell us whose needs should be sacrificed. Who should live without cheap fuel, or cheap power, while the rest of us turn up our noses at hydrocarbons because we have the luxury of choosing a more expensive alternative?

As long as we have ours, right? It’s like the old dilemma for socialists – anyone with less money is poor and deserves help, anyone with more money is rich and should have it confiscated, and no matter how much the socialist has they always seem to occupy that balancing point.

We all are guilty too, to some extent. It’s easy to blame environmentalists for lack of progress, but try building a cell tower in a nest of billionaires. Good luck. It’s the same problem that’s existed forever, NIMBYism, except now it’s big time.

The only way things can move forward is with leadership, real leadership, right from the top. Western nations are crying out for a true leader with courage and vision, not the leadership-by-training-course variety that we are clogging our system like plaque in our arteries. This leadership vacuum creates an extreme danger, that some fascist-type will get elected on a wave of populist support. Donald Trump frightens a lot of people because he appears to be just that, but such is the public hunger for a leader with a backbone that they’re willing to overlook his gargantuan lapses in judgement.

A long time ago in a very weird spot (the front of an accountant’s handbook) I saw a phrase that stuck with me: “A man should be upright, not kept upright.” Maybe it’s time for each of us to adopt a similar but modified motto, that perhaps our level of comfort, or demand for an unsullied view, or slightly irrational fears, should be put aside for the good of a much bigger purpose. And we should demand a lot more of our leaders.