One of the major problems of effectively confronting the climate crisis in the Good Old US of A, the Land of the Free (from Taxes) and Brave, is that American Can’t Infrastructure. Sometime between the Eisenhower administration and the present, we went from being able to construct and maintain a nationwide network of roads to not being able to build a choo-choo without going $100 billion dollars over budget.
I’m a pretty firm believer in learn-by-doing, and I think there’s likely been a sort of vicious cycle since at least the 80s of Republicans killing infrastructure projects, which leads to America doing fewer infrastructure projects, and fucking up more of them, because the government loses the human support skills required to manage infrastructure projects. Building things well is a skill acquired over a lifetime, and there are few mentors left in America.
That’s one reason that I’m hopeful that the IIJ and IRA will be successful in their aim of restructuring the American economy towards carbon neutrality. They have combined pumped $700 billion dollars into US infrastructrure. The Biden Administration has correctly identified that the true threat to American worldwide power this century isn’t military. It’s that a country that cannot manufacture or build anything simply cannot produce the amount of economic value required to be the world leader. And with $700 billion dollars available, there will be a lot of activity.
But the learning curve will be steep, and we will fuck a lot of stuff up. Witness the news this week that the nationwide EV charger network is laughably insecure. All of this stuff runs on the Internet of Things (IoT), which is a pretty new thing. Basically, everything has a computer in it1. And because this is a nascent and fast growing industry, these computers naturally are in the cybersecurity equivalent of middle schoolers, and they get their asses handed to them a lot2.
The implications of this are sort of unknowable, but states like Russia, North Korea and Israel are able to counter some of America’s military dominance through the relatively cheaper weapon of cyberattacks. All of these countries have parts of their cybersecurity apparatus outsourced to nominally non-government shadow groups, allowing them to act with relative impunity. And as the amount of new IoT enabled infrastructure grows, the number of cybersecurity targets multiplies. A nationwide charger hack could quite easily be used to destabilize the entire power grid, making every IoT computer a soft target.
At the same time, as we build, we will learn, and IoT will begin to mature into a more hardened product. The entire infrastructure of the internet is to a shockingly large degree held in place by spit and baling wire, and is in a constant state of rapidly decaying constant chaos. The professionals who battle that and keep the lights on are often underappreciated in the “move fast and break things” era. The costs of screwing up IoT security can be disastrous. But faced with certain crisis if we don’t adapt, the path is clear: build, baby, build. Just, be careful.
It’s common in the tech industry to refer to an underpowered computer as a “toaster”, meaning it’s about as complicated as a toaster. This toaster probably has a computer in it that can play Doom 2.
Bruce Schneier, the legendary security researcher, speculated that not long after autonomous vehicles become commonplace, we may begin to see assasinations carried out by hacked cars.
Wrote about this as well a while ago, there's a lot of risk here that doesn't seem to get that much attention. https://www.climaticthoughts.com/p/cyber-climate-risk