The New York Times provides a deep dive into how the status quo and some serious greenwashing by an outgrowth of the fossil fuel industry—big asphalt—shaped the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) last year. A very big part of the sale job the industry did on Congress was convincing members that asphalt is green, a key material in fighting climate change.
“We are America’s No. 1 most recycled product,” Jay Hansen, the executive vice president for advocacy at the National Asphalt Pavement Association, told the Times. That’s the message they sent all the way back in December 2020 to then-President-elect Joe Biden in a 20-page policy paper. “Our industry is committed to working with you and building environmentally-friendly, sustainable, and resilient pavement infrastructure that is the foundation for America’s economic prosperity,” the trade group said in their letter to the transition.
They were thrilled with the response. Lobbyist Martin T. Whitmer Jr. recalled how advisers to the Biden transition team were swayed. “They didn’t know about asphalt being the most recycled product,” he said. Whitmer pushed that message in his lobbying with lawmakers, too, in casual meetings he set up in a park near the Capitol during the summer. He brought lawn chairs to hang out on and chunks of asphalt for members to see, and he arranged for lawmakers to have field trips to processing plants.
It worked.
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The biggest chunk of the $500 billion in new spending in the law goes to roads and bridges: $350 billion over five years. The vast majority of roads and bridges—94% of them—are paved in asphalt. If the majority of that funding is focused on repairing and maintaining existing structures, greenhouse gas emissions will be minimized, provided there are adequate investments in mass transit and electric vehicles and charging stations. That’s according to an analysis from the Georgetown Climate Center.
If, however, it goes into adding more lanes to existing roads and building new ones, it could increase emissions over the baseline level before the bill passed. “That’s because building more roads consistently results in more traffic—an ‘if you build it, they will come’ effect known as ‘induced demand’,” the analysts conclude. “In short, traffic expands to fill the new lanes within a few short years, bringing with it more pollution.”
Asphalt itself might be a recycled product, but that doesn’t by any means make it green. Some manufacturers are using biofuels rather than petroleum as a base, but the majority of manufacturers are still using petroleum, and the production of it uses energy. The material also emits carbon, while the vehicles traveling on it account for about a third of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions.
“This is a major blind spot for politicians who say they care about climate change,” Kevin DeGood, director of infrastructure policy at the Center for American Progress, told the Times. “Everyone gets that oil pipelines are carbon infrastructure. But new highways are carbon infrastructure, too. Both lock in place 40 to 50 years of emissions.”
It’s not so much a blind spot for Republicans as express policy: Ignore the issue. Back in December, Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) Deputy Administrator Stephanie Pollack wrote a policy memo to express the intent of her agency to “implement policies and undertake actions to encourage—and where permitted by law, require—recipients of Federal highway funding to select projects that improve the condition and safety of existing transportation infrastructure within the right-of-way before advancing projects that add new general purpose travel lanes serving single occupancy vehicles.” That is, a “fix-it first” approach, deemphasizing expansion and new road construction.
Republicans have been raising hell about it since. Earlier this month, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), ranking member of the Environment and Public Works Committee, told governors to just ignore that guidance. They wrote a letter to governors telling them: “Nothing in the IIJA provides FHWA with the authority to dictate how states should use their federal formula funding, nor prioritizes public transit or bike paths over new roads and bridges.”
Last week, more than two dozen Republican senators including McConnell and Capito wrote a letter to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg telling him to rescind the memo. “The policies outlined in the memorandum reflect a decidedly different approach that appears to restrict the flexibility of states and impose one-size-fits-all solutions to solving communities’ surface transportation challenges,” they write in typical language that applies for Republicans to every damn thing except abortion and health care.
“The IIJA does not include any provisions that restrict or discourage specific types of projects, and current programmatic and policy requirements ensure that states are good stewards of their existing assets,” they continue. Legislation rarely does that, and the senators know it. It’s up to the administration to make the rules for implanting the funding in the bill.
Meanwhile, as long as Republicans keep holding up passing an omnibus spending bill, they’re holding up much of the spending authorized by the IIJA. As of now, the $52.5 billion for highway projects for the 2022 fiscal year under the new law isn’t available. The agency has less than $20 billion to spend currently, because it’s constrained by the continuing resolution it’s still operating under. Another program, the Highway Trust Fund, is on hold despite the fact that billions were included for it in the IIJA.
So those states the Republicans are telling to spend the money any way they damned well want to aren’t getting the money to spend because Republicans are holding up the funding because they want President Biden to have to operate under Trump’s budget.
Maybe we need to sick the asphalt lobby on them to get them to cut the omnibus bill loose.