No, Rome was not built in a day, but it was built at breathtaking speed, its temples, amphitheaters, and aqueducts rising with the help of a magical blend of volcanic ash and lime. Today, that miraculous mortar has a less than enchanting name: concrete.

“Romans lived through a true architectural revolution, and at the foundation of this revolution, literally, was a concrete discovery,” said Admir Masic, a materials science professor at MIT who made waves a few years ago for unearthing the fast-hardening secret sauce for why Roman concrete is so durable. “They were able to take a pile of dirt and mix it together, add water, and turn it into solid rock of any arbitrary size. It literally changed everything.” 

And yet, for a millennia after the fall of Rome, the world largely forgot about concrete, until, in the 18th century, an English mason found that mixing limestone and clay could form a paste that hardened underwater. Another few decades later, concrete as we now know it was reborn, and once again, it changed everything. 

In the centuries since, concrete has come to reshape our way of life, with disastrous results for the climate. What early concrete evangelists didn’t realize was that the modern way of producing the substance released giant amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. As it has become increasingly central to modernity, it has helped fuel environmental catastrophe.

Today, however, a new generation of concretophiles like Masic have pored over the poured mixture in search of another miracle, a greener, more durable kind of concrete. And they’ve found multiple answers, from concrete that can heal its own cracks — as the Pantheon has for millennia — to electroconductive concrete capable of storing energy to a blend that allows concrete to soak up more CO2 than it emits. 

Together, they suggest that in a not-so-distant future, concrete — yes, concrete — one of the dirtiest substances ever concocted, could help save the planet, transforming our built environment while actually intervening in the climate for the better. 

How concrete built (and polluted) the modern world

It’s no wonder that luminaries of the neo-concrete age, Thomas Edison among them, marveled at the stuff just as their Roman predecessors had. They saw it as a harbinger of utopia, of a world in which anything and everything — a home, an interstate highway, a water pipe, a subway system, or a grand piano — could be molded and poured for a fraction of ordinary costs. 

“As to concrete dogs to stand warningly in the front yard and concrete cats to purr stonily under a concrete kitchen range,” the New York Times teased Edison in 1911 when he described his plans for a concrete home finished with concrete furnishings, “he made no announcement.”

The beguiled inventor’s utopian vision of a world remade by concrete would come true in more ways than he realized. Yes, it changed the way we build forever. Muddy roads and rotting wooden sidewalks gave way to smooth gray pavement, and newly cast sewer systems saved millions of lives in the deathly dirty cities of the early industrial era. Concrete, when poured over rods of steel, proved strong enough to prop up colossal skyscrapers that Julius Caesar could only have dreamed of. 

But there was a trade-off: Every time Edison fired up his trademark 150-foot kilns, scorching the limestone inside into blistering pebbles of cement clinker, he released hundreds of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. 

Yankee Stadium was built not by Babe Ruth’s swing alone, but with around 30,000 cubic yards of Edison concrete, whose creation released at least 5,400 tons of CO2, the equivalent of driving a gas-powered car 12.5 million miles, or to the moon and back more than two dozen times. But this is nothing compared with the roughly 30 billion tons of concrete the world now uses each year, enough to have turned the gluey gray goo into the second-most used material on Earth. (The first is water. Glug glug.) 

The Anthropocene has been built atop a foundation of concrete, its weight eclipsing the biomass of all living things, and its annual carbon tab responsible for up to 8 percent of global emissions, the equivalent of the entire country of India. Critically, unlike the astonishingly enduring remnants of Rome, our modern concrete decays quickly, so it must be repoured time and time again, which only makes it more environmentally catastrophic. 

But it doesn’t have to be this way, not anymore. 

“The future of concrete is to think differently, to go away from claiming that cement is bad,” Masic told me. “Our goal is to turn this around and make concrete part of the solution instead of being a problem.”

This is why we can have nice concrete

Per ton, concrete actually emits far less CO2 by volume than other materials like aluminum, steel, plastic, or glass. 

The problem is that we use so much of it, even a slightly negative footprint can quickly become enormous. But “the upside is,” said Sabbie Miller, a professor at UC Davis who focuses on sustainable concrete, “if you’re able to come up with some small change, then those small changes will also scale” in ways “that could have a huge effect on modern society and its burdens on the environment.” 

One of those solutions takes a cue from the Romans, who made concrete differently than we do today. Their once-mysterious method ensured that hulking structures like the Colosseum or the Aqua Virgo, an aqueduct built during Augustus’ reign and still in use today, could survive for millennia while New York City’s Brooklyn-Queens Expressway or the Washington Bridge crumble after just a few decades of use. 

It’s not just that we drive cars over our concrete freeways while the Colosseum has been mostly free of even the bulkiest chariot wheels for millennia. The answer, according to Masic’s research, lies in the Romans’ ingenious recipe for cement, the glue that binds concrete together. When the ancients brewed a batch of cement, they left big white chunks of dormant lime in the final mixture. Later, if a crack formed, any water would react with the idle lime, filling the fissure with new stone. Our modern concrete has no such lime clasts, meaning that if water seeps into a crack, it degrades the structure from within, rusting the rebar that made our big towers possible, leading to a grim condition known as “concrete cancer.” 

Masic has recently turned his research into a startup called DMAT that reserves unreacted lime in concrete, giving it self-healing properties he says could extend a structure’s lifespan by about 50 percent, which in and of itself would reduce its carbon footprint by 40 percent. If the construction industry normalized such concrete or other mixtures that emit, say, half as much CO2 as usual, it would keep hundreds of millions of tons of it out of the atmosphere each year. 

But why stop there? Some startups have gotten much better in recent years at producing concrete capable of quite literally breathing in more CO2 than it emits in a process that takes advantage of concrete’s natural porousness. It could, in theory, turn our cities into concrete rainforests by turning the material into a storage reservoir. As Miller put it, “what if we can use our concrete to undo some of our environmental damages that we’ve already caused?” 

In the Bahamas, the startup Partanna has already built what it’s called the world’s first carbon net-negative home, an unassuming 1,250-square-foot abode that the company claims will sequester 182.6 tons of CO2 in its lifetime, the equivalent of hundreds of trees. Meanwhile, Masic’s lab has been piloting ways to turn concrete into a giant battery, capable of storing solar power during the day and releasing it at night, a green innovation that could cancel out its own carbon footprint within a few years of use. 

Masic believes that electroconductivity could be key to catalyzing a new era of concrete — more so even than his neo-Roman ventures. “It might hold the secret,” he said,  “for turning a bad guy into something amazing.” 

But as promising as these innovations are, it will take time for them to ripple out from model homes and into the concrete that actually surrounds us. American concrete startups have lost billions of dollars in federal funding and expected procurement contracts under the Trump administration. Some states, most notably California, are helping to pick up the slack, but investment still lags behind potential. There’s also the challenge of convincing builders running on paper thin margins that their old ways of doing things might fit better in a new mould. 

But concrete’s staggering scale means that we can’t afford to keep pouring it without considering its ugly trade-offs. More importantly, perhaps, we can’t afford to miss out on the opportunity that such a mammoth, transformative material presents to change everything yet again. 

“We should look for love!” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy bellowed while flanked by his nine children at the Great American State Fair in June: “Get married, and have lots of kids!”

In a brazen attempt to make Duffy’s ethos a matter of policy, the Trump administration announced a strange new plan earlier this month tying a huge tranche of federal funding for public transit to high fertility and marriage rates. 

If the plan goes into effect, then communities with a high number of traditional nuclear families could get a 10 percent funding boost to build new trains, bus routes, and ferry lines. “If you want federal funding,” Duffy’s Transportation Department said in a statement, then “your project needs to align with where communities and families are actually growing.”

Trump, who has dubbed himself the “fertilization president,” and his bevvy of neopatriarchal trad–pilled deputies have long nursed a fixation with the country’s declining birth rate. But dubious as this new policy may be, it stumbles upon a genuine pain point in the nation’s public transit systems: They are not nearly as family friendly as they should be. And regardless of whether these discomfitingly pronatalist guidelines ever go into effect as written — and they probably will — they raise important questions about how American families use our transit systems now, and the policies could actually make their lives easier in the long run.

The same woes that affect all riders — long wait times, inaccessible stations, inadequate reach, and crowded rush hours — often doubly affect families. That’s one reason why so many of them have fled the nation’s densest, most transit-oriented cities in search of suburbs where they need not lug a stroller up yet another broken escalator to reach a subway platform.

Families who can’t afford to trade in their MetroCards and bus passes for minivans may find themselves priced into housing served by especially substandard transit options, funneling them into brutal, hours-long commutes. According to one landmark study, the single strongest factor in predicting social mobility in the US is neither crime nor test scores nor the presence of “traditional” two-parent households, but access to adequate transportation. With every extra minute a child spends commuting to school, they become less likely to move out poverty as an adult.

And for that reason alone, American families with kids do deserve special attention when it comes to how and where and why we build public transit. On this, the Trump administration got something right, even if they got there for all the wrong reasons — ones that I, a childless woman of childbearing age, find vaguely ethnonationalist, and above all, personally creepy. 

But families often need public transportation most in the places where it’s otherwise hardest to raise kids — which is to say in dense cities rather than in already car-centric suburbs. In that sense, especially, In fact, it might make circumstances even worse for the families that really rely on public transit every day.

What family-friendly public transit actually looks like

Marriage and birth rates might sound like a reasonable proxy for where families live, but in reality, according to an analysis by the Urban Institute, the places with the most “traditional” nuclear families tend to be whiter and wealthier than the population at large, and are much more likely to get around by car, not trains or buses. 

We are talking about the suburbs here, which, while certainly deserving of their own transit infrastructure, rarely rely on trains or buses the way that a carless family living on the outer edges of a major city might. And yet the Trump administration has typically treated those very communities — some of which do, in fact, have high birth rates — with contempt or even outright antipathy. 

Consider Chicago’s Red Line, the busiest corridor of the city’s L rail system, which serves some 138 million people per year. The line has long been in need of expansion, and a $5.7 billion extension close to 60 years in the making finally broke ground earlier this year. It will add 5.5 more miles of track with four new stations in the city’s southernmost neighborhoods.

For over half a century, families in the far South Side of Chicago have cobbled together grueling commutes that force them to transfer from buses and trains to reach downtown Chicago, which helps explain why unemployment and poverty rates in the area remain so stubbornly high. Communities like Roseland, where many of the new stations will be built, are considered to be among the most challenging places in the nation to raise a child, but thousands of local families still find ways to do so.

Roseland has a much higher birth rate than the national average, meaning that in theory, Duffy’s transportation department should be itching to send extra funds to transit projects there. But first they have to be willing to fund it at all, and if past policies hold, they may be reluctant to do just that. Just last year, the Trump administration opted to freeze federal funds already allocated to the Red Line extension, plunging the long-awaited project into yet another prolonged period of infrastructural purgatory. 

That move plays into a broader pattern: The Trump administration has hampered dozens of transit projects like the Red Line, seemingly in its broader push to starve Democratic-led cities of federal infrastructure dollars. While a federal judge eventually intervened to allow the Red Line extension to proceed, if the Trump administration’s new guidelines go into effect after public comments close in November, then more projects like it in other urban communities will likely be deprioritized. 

Ultimately, it is the suburbanites who are most poised to benefit from the Trump administration’s proposed policy.

An example is FrontRunner 2X in Utah, a commuter rail project that will slash travel time for Utahns traveling across the state, and will also help Salt Lake City shoulder an influx of tourists when it hosts the Olympics in 2034. It received federal support through the same tranche of funding as Chicago’s Red Line extension. In stark contrast with that more urban initiative, FrontRunner 2X has been the rare public transit project to receive continued support under the Trump administration.

Utah has some of the highest birth and marriage rates in the country, so it’s not a stretch of the imagination to say that if the Trump administration has its way, then the United States will see more projects like FrontRunner 2X get funded, while others like the Red Line extension face bureaucratic bottlenecks and funding freezes. Roseland’s high birth rate notwithstanding, the neighborhood has some of the lowest marriage rates in the country, meaning that even if a project there did manage to eke out federal support, then according to this new calculus, it would still receive significantly less funding from the federal government than a place like the suburbs of Salt Lake City where married families with children are more common.   

Trump’s new pronatalist transit agenda is, at the very least, an indication that after two years spent twiddling their thumbs, firing Amtrak executives, and venerating cars big and small, he may finally be building a semi-coherent transit strategy. And his Transportation Department has allowed a few genuinely family-friendly upgrades for the country’s transit infrastructure to proceed, including grants to add space for strollers on trains and buses.

But you can’t claim to support American families while siphoning federal dollars away from the projects that could actually be transformational to their lives. I am not one to decry a commuter rail renaissance, but it shouldn’t come at the expense of places where American families — the ones Duffy says he’s so keen on having more babies — don’t have any other choice but to wait an hour for the bus to get to work. 

Jonathan Hale was ready to lay down his paint rollers. Hale, a law student turned viral road safety advocate, had run into legal trouble for painting his own DIY crosswalks across some of Los Angeles’s most dangerous intersections. In a meeting with LA Mayor Karen Bass earlier this year, he told her that if the city could commit to making its own streets safer for pedestrians, then he would stop his own vigilante activism. 

“Dude, you’re the mayor. Do something about this. It’s you, dude,” he recalls insisting to Bass — in so many words — after she apologized for his arrest on vandalism charges for a paint job last December. For months, Hale upheld his end of the bargain and stopped painting, believing in her office’s emailed assurances that a new executive order was coming soon. 

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But, eventually, after weeks of unresponsiveness, Hale grew tired of waiting, just as he had the first time he picked up a stencil and a bucket of white paint. “We’re so focused on looking for reasons why we can’t do stuff instead of ways that we can,” he said, “and it’s just paralyzed our institutions.” 

Across the country, such civic paralysis has compelled a legion of guerrilla urbanists to take their city’s matters into their own hands. In Boston, a group of cyclists used strips of green and white duct tape to build a bike lane at an intersection where a truck struck and killed 36-year-old Louisa Gag in July. In Nashville, Kansas City, and across the Bay Area, volunteers have built and installed their own public benches at bus stops where city officials had slowly removed places to sit, after years spent curating increasingly hostile public spaces. 

Every time one of these friendly neighborhood vigilantes paints a crosswalk, fills a pothole, or builds a bench, they remind us that it is not actually that hard — or even that expensive — to do many of the simple things that can make our cities safer and more pleasant places to live. Though our local governments may seem incapable of getting these basic tasks done, they are probably less constrained by money than they are by a sluggish status quo. And in some cases, they’re so afraid of being sued that they’d rather build nothing at all. 

“We see the fear of litigation and liability” so thoroughly sabotaging mundane municipal projects that “a crosswalk takes half-a-million dollars in five years to do when it’s really a bucket of paint in an afternoon,” said Anthony Garcia, a Miami-based urban planner who, with his longtime collaborator Mike Lydon, pioneered the study of tactical urbanism, or low-cost, quick-fix interventions often led by ordinary citizens themselves. Both Garcia and Lydon now advise cities nationally on how to integrate the practices of guerrilla urbanists into the ways they govern and pilot their own new policies. “You don’t have to hold a crosswalk to the same standard that you hold a bridge,” Garcia said.

It can be inspiring when a random citizen feels compelled to pick up a paintbrush and finish what their city can’t seem to start, but it is also an infuriating embodiment of just how stunted some of our most basic systems of governance have become. These industrious urban vigilantes show that making our cities more livable can be an easy, and even joyous practice. But if their work is going to serve as more than mere symbolism, cities themselves will need to learn from their example — or, as some municipalities have recently demonstrated, find new ways to collaborate.

“The point of the crosswalks is the protest. It’s to draw awareness to the issue,” not to create a permanent class of illicit crosswalk painters, Hale told me. “We need to hold the government to a higher standard.”

The quasi-legal case for taking your street into your own hands

While there are some reasons that a municipality would take longer to install a bench or paint a crosswalk than a crew of local residents — compliance with regulations and the installation of proper signage comes to mind — they rarely need to take as long as they often do now.

Take Los Angeles, where even the most basic road safety projects can take years to build, racking up eye-popping bills along the way. Some of these delays have proved deadly. For over a decade, the city sat on funds to improve a perilous intersection in Koreatown, according to Streetsblog, an intersection where, last summer, a drunk driver hit and killed 9-year-old Nadir Gavarrete. 

As the city twiddled its thumbs in the days that followed, the Crosswalk Collective LA — a DIY group that gave Hale his start — started painting. It wasn’t until three months after Gavarrete was killed that the city scrubbed the guerrilla crosswalks, replacing them with “official” crosswalks and a tiny, temporary traffic circle. A permanent solution is supposedly on its way this year.

It shouldn’t take this long, and though cities like LA have the resources and expertise to pull off more permanent and often more effective solutions than a group of vigilantes could, it also shouldn’t take a profound tragedy to convince them to finally act. And just as importantly, they should be capable of also making the sort of small, low-cost, even temporary interventions in the interim, ones that don’t require bespoke planning and a prolonged procurement process.  

As much as Hale has come to enjoy painting crosswalks along with the group he founded, People’s Vision Zero, he does so not as a hobby, but as an expression of discontent with a government that rarely seems to take the safety of his streets as seriously as he’d like them to. Painting a rogue bike lane or giving bus riders a place to sit might not do all that much to fix what’s wrong with our cities directly, but every single DIY urbanist I’ve spoken to has told me that their efforts have helped them reclaim a sense of collective agency over how their cities function, after years of frustration with seemingly impenetrable civic institutions. 

“It’s very easy to feel small, and that nothing that you do matters,” said Carter Lavin, co-founder of the TransBay Coalition, a transit advocacy group with ties to the San Francisco Bay Area Bench Collective, but “one thing about building benches is that every screw you drive, every board you sand makes your neighbor’s life better, and it does it for hundreds of people.”

Unfortunately, getting a city to formalize these often quasi-legal urban interventions is no easy feat, as Pastor Robin Owen, a local nonprofit leader in Nashville who writes a Substack called Jesus Urbanist, knows all too well.

For the past year, Owen has been embroiled in a cat-and-mouse game with the city of Nashville in which she and her growing bunch of bench-building acolytes install a DIY bench that the city later removes, after which they replace it with another bench, which the city will inevitably remove again. For many municipalities, getting rid of useful changes proves far easier than simply implementing them in the first place.

As ill-fated as that dance might seem, it can still feel more meaningful to locals, Owen told me, than the even more hapless task of prodding the government to get something done itself. 

“When you care about a place and want to make it better, you’ve very likely spent hours in meetings or emailing elected officials, and progress is just really complicated and slow,” she told me, “and building a bench and then putting it on a street corner, you actually do something that impacts someone’s life.”

How cities can learn to build the simple stuff quickly

Advocates tell me that in almost every case they would much prefer to work with their city governments than against them. And sometimes they do: For well over a decade, the local transit advocacy group Reconnect Rochester has partnered with Rochester, New York to lay out boxy, brightly colored “bus stop cubes” at transit corridors around the city. Critically, these boxes were permitted.

“If we were to have just kind of gone out there and done this in the dark of night without following any sort of process,” Mary Staropoli, co-executive director of Reconnect Rochester, told me, “I think those bus stop cubes would have been quickly removed.”

Owen has tried for months to convince her city to issue a similar permit for her benches. Nashville happens to boast one of the nation’s only programs dedicated explicitly to facilitating tactical urbanism, which should have made this an unusually straightforward process. And yet, because of a new requirement compelling such projects to pay for liability insurance, she says that she cannot obtain a permit without paying thousands of dollars to protect benches that cost just $35 a pop to build. 

With the exception of some disability protections, cities are indeed far likelier to get sued over the infrastructure they build than over the infrastructure they never bothered to build at all. A crosswalk that never gets painted is one less crosswalk to worry about. A bench that never gets built can’t lead to a lawsuit. But if they never get built at all, then they also have no chance of protecting a pedestrian from a speeding car, or giving an elderly commuter a place to sit. 

“There is this massive moral disconnection where cities are not concerned about liability when it comes to people dying in traffic violence, but are concerned about liability when citizens take action ourselves,” Owen said. “We should be more concerned about our moral liability of people having to suffer as they navigate our cities.” 

Nevertheless, when a citizen paints a crosswalk or builds a bench, whether as a stopgap as an act of protest, it can also exert a sort of “productive tension” on a city, said Lydon, one that can compel a static government to act much more quickly than it would otherwise, even if such changes takes time to materialize.

It wasn’t until a group of local wheelchair users took sledgehammers to sidewalks and began pouring their own cement ramps in the 1970s that Berkeley, California became one of the first cities in the nation to mandate curb cuts, now a hallmark of nationally mandated accessible design that benefit almost everyone at some point: parents pushing strollers, travelers pulling roller bags, and the rest of us in one way or another. 

And in another famous example, a graduate student named Matt Tomasulo zip tied a few dozen wayfinding signs to street poles around Raleigh, North Carolina in 2012, telling passerby how far away various destinations were by walking. While the city initially tore down the signs, they proved popular enough that Raleigh changed course, eventually integrating them into its own planning.

“We’ve documented this over and over,” Lydon said, noting the shift that comes when a city stops fighting a guerrilla intervention and opts to embrace or iterate upon it instead. “You can do these small things, and it can very much lead to transformational change.”

There’s no place like Kansas, a state whose howling winds are so fierce that in the 1800s, the roaring soundscape drove local farmers into madness. It is so windy in Kansas that every so often, trains get swept off their tracks or trampolines get hurled into the air and flung into neighbors’ trees. 

But today, the same gusts that whisked away Dorothy’s home have made Kansas the third-most wind-powered place in the country, its great plains dotted with thousands of twirling turbines responsible for generating over half of the state’s energy. 

And for years, Kansas has been trying to share. 

But that’s easier said than done in the US, where building power lines across state borders can be an onerous, litigious, and bureaucratic slog. The Grain Belt Express, a proposed 800-mile high-voltage line carrying Kansas’s windy riches across Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana, has been trying to get built for the past 16 years. When completed, it will allow Kansas to pump five times as much wind power into Missouri as it does now. But though the project received its first approval in 2013, it will likely not open until 2029 at the earliest, beset by regulatory hurdles across multiple jurisdictions and an endless stream of legal challenges that immediately halt progress every time a new injunction is filed. Alas, the express — which only broke ground this year — was forced to run oh so local. 

But other projects like it might soon enjoy far more reasonable timelines. On Wednesday, a bipartisan group of Senators announced a deal called the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act, or BAAJA — an acronym that’s led to a slew of cringeworthy euphoric Baja Blast references from abundance Democrats, clean energy advocates, and oil industry lobbyists alike. If passed, it would significantly curtail Americans’ ability to endlessly litigate against energy projects they don’t like, and empower the federal government to push critical multistate projects forward even if one state or municipality drags its feet. That could remake the way the nation’s energy infrastructure gets built, including its interstate transmission lines, for decades to come. 

But the bill also suggests that easing the way for clean energy in the US may require simultaneously creating the conditions for more oil and gas infrastructure in a country that already has a lot of it. It would also mean defanging some of the landmark regulatory norms that for decades have, for example, given Americans a say over developments that could contaminate their drinking water and helped tribes protect sacred heritage sites. These laws were necessary in the first place because prior to the 1970s, American communities frequently found themselves both literally and figuratively steamrolled  by developers singularly focused on building things quickly with little regard for the oil spills, river fires, and bifurcated neighborhoods they left in their wake.

And yet today, half a century later, that same dilemma has, in some ways, turned on its head. America builds things too slowly, and in particular, it builds the kind of infrastructure desperately needed to usher in a transition to clean energy with little of the urgency you’d expect from a world in the throes of climate change-related disaster. Exasperatingly, some of the same protections that have played a critical role in making this nation safer may also be standing in the way of building a nation that is more affordable and sustainable in the long run.

There are still plenty of reasons to feel hopeful about the world’s transition away from fossil fuels, even in the US, which has lagged behind our peers while still building an extraordinary number of solar and wind farms, particularly in Republican-led states like Kansas and Texas. And yet, many of these projects have languished in never-ending Ticketmaster-esque queues to connect to the nation’s decrepit power grid, a direct result of the permitting hellscape that prevents much-needed high-voltage cables like the Grain Belt Express from coming online.      

This new bill aims to ease many of the bottlenecks that stymie clean energy, but it also throws a bone to fossil fuels, which, like renewables, would benefit from less onerous environmental reviews and quicker permissions. This is, after all, a bipartisan bill in a Congress that, at least for now, remains Republican-led, under the tutelage of an aggrieved president who has sabotaged some of the nation’s most promising clean energy projects with an often petty and relentless fervor. Some Democrats in Congress, along with other environmentalists, have raised serious concerns about the bill. Those initial objections may prophesize an uphill battle for it when it comes to a vote, likely after the November midterms. 

Even so, with American electricity bills spiking to frightening new heights, and a data center buildout that could all but snap the power grid in half, this ambitious deal is, at the very least, an indication that some of the nation’s representatives are finally listening. And if it passes into law in the months to come, it could very well remake how Americans get their energy for a generation. 

So why are environmentalists mad?

By most accounts, the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act almost didn’t happen. 

For months, the proposed permitting deal has been stalled by the Trump administration’s failure to assure Democrats that the president would lay off his attacks on “windmills” and other clean energy projects. But in recent days, lawmakers appear to have come close to a fragile détente on the back of a “very reasonable opening proposal” from the White House, according to Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), the ranking member of the Environment and Public Works Committee. 

If the BAAJA is passed, it will codify new protections that legally prevent presidents like Trump from meddling with already-permitted energy projects or singling out specific forms of energy, a prohibition that will also apply if a Democratic president attempts to halt an approved gas line or a petroleum refinery. The Biden administration’s freeze on approvals for new natural gas export plants, for example, would not be allowed. 

It’s this element of the proposed bill that worries many environmentalists most. According to a transcript obtained by Punchbowl News, during a coalition call on Thursday, dozens of advocates from prominent environmental groups — including the Sierra Club, the National Wildlife Federation, and the Environmental Law & Policy Center — expressed their misgivings about the bill and strategized about how to lobby Democrats against it.

Most environmentalists acknowledge, however, that we need to spruce up the power grid and fix how permitting works for clean energy projects and transmission lines. As clean energy advocates know all too well, the projects they support are, paradoxically, more likely to be hampered by environmental reviews than fossil fuel projects are, because renewables usually require more space and represent the bulk of new energy developments. But many advocates understandably take issue with the idea that reforming this overcomplicated process may require weakening the right to challenge other projects, a right affirmed by the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the National Historic Preservation Act. 

The bill’s fate may ultimately depend on whether this trade-off is worth it. The BAAJA still does leave some room for court challenges if they’re filed within 150 days of an approval. But it will still place a much larger burden for determining these damage thresholds on federal agencies, which are, of course, currently controlled by Trump.

“The question’s not whether that would be a good idea — it’s one of the basic building blocks for converting more of our energy system to renewables,” the environmentalist Bill McKibben wrote of grid expansion and permitting reform on his Substack this week. “It’s how many pounds of flesh the fossil fuel industry would demand in return, and how close to vital organs that flesh would be located.”

The problem is, no matter how many Congressional seats Democrats seem poised to scoop up in November, they will still need to get Republicans on board if they want Americans to be able to really see the benefits of solar, the cheapest energy source of all time, reflected on their power bill. And for most of the nation, if not Earth itself, that transition can’t come soon enough. 

Buried beneath every American city is a mysterious jumble of cables, pipes, and gas lines, entangled like a pair of wired headphones the moment you pull them out of your pocket. Every time a contractor sticks a shovel in the asphalt, they embark on a high-risk excavate-by-dots obstacle course, dodging color-coded clusters of spaghetti-like power lines, gas mains, sewers, and fiber-optic cables. A line of blue spray paint means water. Red means power. Yellow is gas. Orange is telecom. 

About 700,000 times a year — that’s once every 47 seconds — something goes wrong. 

A backhoe slices into a cable and cuts off a 911 call center, or a woman comes home to find her dryer and hot water heater on fire after a contractor pierced her electrical line. Just last week, a contractor accidentally severed a single telecommunication cable that proved critical enough to ground flights at some of the nation’s largest airports on the eve of the UN General Assembly, ensnaring even world leaders like Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney in delays. 

The ground beneath our city streets has never been so crowded, driven by a furious race to lay fiber optic cables carrying the data that fills your social media feeds and transmits your ChatGPT queries. Nor have the systems we use to find out where it’s safe to dig — namely, a hotline and all that colorful spray paint — ever felt so catastrophically insufficient. 

“If the locator mismarked the line, if the line wasn’t marked, if there was no map that even said the line was there,” said Sarah Magruder Lyle, president of the Common Ground Alliance, a trade association focused on underground damage prevention, “there are a variety of issues that could happen before the excavator even puts a shovel or a backhoe in the ground.”

According to Common Ground, such incidents cost the US about $83.2 billion per year, roughly as much as we invest in public transit annually nationwide. But the actual financial toll may be even higher, because every time a crew stumbles across a mislabeled power line or a gas pipe everyone else forgot about, it can delay construction for months on end. As Magruder Lyle put it, “if they get out there and they find something that they’re not supposed to, you have to go back and reengineer the whole project.” 

Such surprises can also lead to tragedy. A 5-year-old named Alistair Lamb was killed in Missouri last spring after a contractor drilled into a gas line near his home, spewing fumes that leveled his house when his unsuspecting father flipped a light switch. And just this May, another unmarked gas line killed three people when contractors struck it, leading an apartment complex in Dallas to explode.

Yet the messy underbelly of our cities remains largely invisible, with accountability for issues foisted upon and at times evaded by a hodgepodge of finger-pointing private utility companies, agencies, and contractors. And that’s a shame because there is, in fact, a better way to bury the cables and pipelines that our modern lives depend on, and a multitude of better ways that we can find the ones we’ve already buried. 

What Disney World gets right about the stuff we bury

To understand one utopian vision for how all this could work, look no further than the happiest place on Earth. That’s a moniker Disney World has earned, in my mind, not for its Mickey Mouse waffles (though my niece may disagree), but for its world-class utility corridors, also known as utilidors.

Directly beneath the Magic Kingdom is a sprawling network of tunnels. Initially designed to shepherd around Mickey and his friends, the system now also serves as one of the largest utility corridors ever created. Unlike the rest of America, where cables are typically dumped in ditches before being covered with dirt, the electrical lines that power Cinderella’s castle quite literally get the princess treatment. 

Alongside water pipes, sewers, and animatronic control systems, these power lines lace the walls and ceilings of the utilidors, meaning they’re protected from weather and changes in the soil. They are also easy to monitor, catalog, and access if something needs fixing. While the cost of building a controlled system like this is much higher upfront than burying directly in the ground, the practice virtually eliminates the risk of accidentally rupturing a gas main or slicing a fiber optic cable during routine maintenance. Once they’re built, they can also drastically reduce costs in the long run because you no longer need to tear up a street every time a utility needs fixing. 

“Obviously, it’s expensive,” said Debra Laefer, a professor of civil and urban engineering at New York University, “but in the long term, it would be hugely cheaper,” especially “in areas where we are digging all the time, there’s a direct business case for moving towards these utilidors.”

As fantastical as Disney World’s imagineered system may seem — and it was, to be clear, predicated on a not-easily-reproducible master plan — the idea of storing utility lines in easy-to-access tunnels is not just for amusement parks. It is possible even in places where most of those lines are currently lying in the dirt, as Prague proved back in the 1970s, when the city decided it was fed up with destroying its precious cobblestone streets every time a buried pipe or cable needed fixing. The city now boasts a sprawling utility tunnel network, occasionally patrolled, evidently, by a couple of robot dogs tasked with mapping out every cable. 

Singapore has also spent years building out walkable utility corridors that operate much like the Magic Kingdom’s, transmitting water, data, and energy from the safety of well-organized underground tunnels. Some of Tokyo’s largest districts store their cables and gas lines in huge concrete utility ducts, and many Parisian water lines and fiber optics are kept across the city’s centuries-old sewer system, a catacombs of waste made easily navigable by blue-and-white street signs that correspond to the avenues above. Many university campuses across the US also boast their own sprawling utilidors.

In most cases, cities chose not to relocate utilities all at once, a feat that would probably be financially prohibitive and deeply disruptive. Rather, they took advantage of all the times they’ve needed to relocate utility lines anyway, a standard (and expensive) practice for big building projects like the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing or the Second Avenue Subway, a major transportation project in New York City that’s been consistently delayed by unmapped utility lines. A group of graduate students found that building such a tunnel in parts of NYC would likely cost at least twice as much as dropping a utility line in the ground, but could recoup the costs within 47 years. 

“There are streets in New York City that have been excavated at least once a year, every year for the past 30 years,” Laefer said. If you just prioritize those streets, gathering the piping in a “big concrete box” underground, you could allow workers to complete most repairs without needing to disturb the streets or sidewalks above at all.

But building new utility tunnels would require that we first come to better understand the wires and piping already entangled under our cities, which if you recall, we have only a surprisingly flimsy picture of in most cities today. But if every surprise utility line is an opportunity to move it somewhere better, it is also an opportunity, at the very least, to map out where it is.

To that end, a few years ago, Laefer led a $1.2 million pilot funded by the National Science Foundation to create a test case for 3D-mapping New York City’s underground utilities, a project that’s since been adopted into a citywide initiative. The city says it plans to roll out the spruced up utilities locating system in 2028. The UK debuted a similar digital map of over 3 million kilometers of underground pipes and power, owned by hundreds of utilities and agencies a few years ago. The nation projects that it could help save over $500 million per year by minimizing delays and accidental damage. In places where Singapore has not yet stuffed its utilities into walkable tunnels, the city’s own mapping and utilities coordination has already saved it an estimated $230 million in avoided clashes since 2024. Not bad for an intervention that doesn’t even require any physical rebuilding.

So why hasn’t every American city copied London or Singapore?

Well, US cities tend to be plagued by even more private utilities and patchwork local and state norms and regulations than a nation like the United Kingdom. Getting them to pool together what they often consider proprietary underground data is challenging, and few local officials have opted to prioritize such efforts. But this may well change as more and more fiber optics go into the ground, more flights get canceled, more apartment complexes explode, more power lines flicker off, more sinkholes form, and more Americans come to be all too acquainted with the perils lurking just beneath our feet. 

“I think at this point, it’s more about political will and money than any technical obstacle,” Laefer said. “Technically, we’re there. It’s just a matter of doing it.”

There is a kind of terror-tinged embarrassment that comes from dozing off on your beach towel on the sand, only to find a rising tide intrude upon your mid-nap bliss, lapping at your toes and sweeping away your sunglasses.

It is a truth I relearn every June, one that arrives like the season’s first sunburn: The ocean is inevitable, and Poseidon always reclaims his own. Actor Nicolas Cage learned a far more serious — or more expensive, certainly — version of that lesson earlier this month, when a furious high surf siphoned the ground beneath his Malibu, California, mansion, collapsing his driveway and front porch into a gigantic 30-foot-by-30-foot sinkhole. The cave-in ruptured a gas main, swallowed an access road, and forced dozens of locals to evacuate. In the process, it put into stark, cinematic relief the unyielding threat of coastal erosion in every community in the nation with a view of the sea.

It’s impossible not to imagine Cage standing on the edge of that yawning pit as he might in one of his films, bombastic in his bafflement, every outsize gesture a pantomime of confusion. But no one should have been surprised. As far back as 1976, the California Coastal Commission denied a proposal to build a home on the lot where Cage’s Malibu home now teeters over the void, citing “concerns over wave hazards.” In 1986, the same commission rejected another residential proposal on the land, deeming it an “extremely hazardous area” threatened by waves and erosion. 

So why, just a few years later, was a home built there anyway, one that would eventually come to be owned by a certain Hollywood eccentric? A few years after their initial rejections, the waterfront lot’s original owners were able to convince the commission that with enough clever engineering, including a sea wall and concrete stilts, the home, its septic system, driveway, and access road could be protected from the sea god’s wrath. But much like Odysseus before him, Cage has found the hard way that the lord of waves does not easily forget his due. “What is the Grail but Earth itself?” he once told the New York Times, characteristically mythologizing his real estate acquisitions. “The divine object is Earth.”

In this case, at least, Cage chose the wrong cup. But Cage is hardly alone in laying out his home atop the wrong stretch of sand. Nearly all of the nation’s coastal communities — from ritzy enclaves like Malibu to working-class quarters of the Rockaways in New York — rely on coastal engineering to remain inhabitable, dumping sand or erecting sea walls to put off a perpetually and increasingly rising tide. 

To put this into perspective, almost one-third of Americans live along a coastline, and while few of us have the kind of luxury oceanfront views that Cage and his neighbors enjoy, our beachside apartment complexes, utility lines, and coastal highways suffer from the same risks his driveway does. Most of us, however, lack the benefit of a second home or a private island to flee to if something goes catastrophically wrong. 

When a sinkhole opens underneath a celebrity’s driveway, or a stilted home collapses into the sea, it is a reminder that we have built huge swaths of our beloved coastal communities on land that was never meant to sit still. If we want them to survive, we will need to learn to embrace new ways of packing our beach towns up and wheeling them further upshore. Logistically implausible as it may sound — difficult as, say, stealing the Declaration of Independence — it’s a process that several American communities have become much better at in recent years. 

“This is not a problem that is unique to Malibu, which just so happens to be some of the most spectacularly beautiful and spectacularly expensive real estate in America,” said Kara Murphy Schlichting, an environmental historian at Queens College in NYC. “This is a question that is coming for all of America’s coastal communities.”

Say it ain’t sinkhole

The void that swallowed Cage’s driveway with the gusto of the actor chewing scenery in one of his films was no ordinary sinkhole. In fact, if you asked a geologist, they would tell you that it was not, technically speaking, a true sinkhole at all. 

“It’s not what I typically would consider a sinkhole,” Michael Sukop, a hydrogeology professor at Florida International University, told me. That’s because most sinkholes form when rainwater or a leaky pipe slowly seeps into the porous bedrock beneath our highways, homes, and soccer fields, creating a cavern that screeches open during a heavy downpour or when the infrastructure above it becomes too heavy to bear. 

There is no accurate accounting of every sinkhole in the US, but geologists widely believe that they have become more frequent globally, driven by extreme weather linked to climate change, aging infrastructure, and what Sukop calls “people moving into sinkhole country,” meaning places like Florida where the bedrock is highly soluble. Some of the worst places for sinkholes in the country are in landlocked states like Missouri, whose unique landscape boasts upward of 16,000 sinkholes, which often open after heavy rainfall.   

But Cage’s sinkhole was formed not from hidden cavities in the bedrock, but from a high surf strong enough to slip under his sea wall and wash away the soggy soil beneath his asphalt and, presumably, his Rolls-Royce Phantoms. It was spurred not by rainfall or a leaky pipe but by a tidal force akin to the one that can put a damper on — or literally dampen, anyway — a beach spot that seemed perfectly sandy when the surf was low. 

@accuweather

A homeowner on North Carolina’s Outer Banks paid to move their beachfront home away from the shore to prevent it from collapsing into the ocean, as several neighboring homes have.

♬ original sound – AccuWeather

But while I can learn to lug my sodden towel and cooler a little further upshore, the same cannot easily be said for Cage’s $10.5 million abode, built — like much of Malibu — atop a constantly shifting coastline. Which isn’t to say that it wouldn’t be a good idea to try.

“It’s a fiction that we can keep a coast in a single place,” said Schlichting. And it is a fiction upheld by hundreds of millions of dollars spent each year on temporary solutions meant to hold the ocean still, and protect the luxury homes and boardwalks we’ve built along it. 

The pristine, sandy beaches that most of us think of when we think of the word “beach” are often heavily manufactured for our pleasure, much like an urban park might be seeded with carefully cultivated trees and brush. In fact, the federal government spends hundreds of millions of dollars each year to dump sand atop eroded coastlines, a process known as beach renourishment, in addition to many more billions spent on sea walls and other structures that can keep a coastline in place for a little while. 

“The most endangered species on the coast is not a turtle or a piping plover; it’s an unengineered beach,” said Robert Young, director of the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines, who has been tracking beach renourishment projects since the 1980s. “And it’s unsustainable because as sea level continues to rise, we are having to pump that sand more and more frequently.”

How to save coastal neighborhoods

Earlier this year, Malibu released a long-awaited Coastal Vulnerability Assessment that twice called out the acute dangers that erosion poses for Sea Level Drive, a small stretch of private road, upon which a gaping crater now sits where Nicolas Cage’s driveway used to be. As this year’s goliath El Niño gets into full swing, his misfortune is unlikely to be the city’s last. 

Already, the spectacular seafront Pacific Coast Highway faces a gauntlet of exigencies, among them landslides, wildfires, and, of course, a coastline that simply won’t sit still, creeping further and further inland each year. Just this weekend, officials in Malibu issued a warning about hazardous conditions at local beaches, with “severe beach erosion” exposing steel and concrete debris sticking across the coastline.  

“Nature itself does not destroy the coast. It moves the coast,” said Young, but if infrastructure like the Pacific Coast Highway lies in the way of that movement, then there is only so much that building a sea wall or dumping 300,000 cubic yards of sand every five years will do. “No matter where you are, whether you are in California or South Carolina or New Jersey, we are still building in dumb places.”

Much like laying a log in front of your beach towel won’t hold the tide back for very long, these measures are often only a temporary balm. But there is another way, one that involves moving the proverbial towel — or permanent infrastructure — away from the shore, a process known as managed retreat.

As implausible as it may sound, when you take into account just how much money has gone into keeping the coast still, lugging a few celebrity mansions, a beachside school, or a sliver of highway across town might be a Herculean labor worth attempting. 

“It’s totally doable,” said Young. “We can move just about everything.” On the coast of North Carolina, the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, one of the tallest brick lighthouses in the world, was moved in 1999, a feat that Young helped pull off. At the time, he said, locals  “wanted to shoot us over” the effort, sure that the centuries-old structure would fall down. “And you know what? It’s safe now,” he said, noting that just down the beach in Buxton and in nearby Rodanthe, dozens of homes have collapsed into the ocean since 2020.

But even in places where such coastal relocations were once commonplace, it’s still not an easy sell for most coastal policymakers and their constituents, especially in places like Malibu, whose density and geography make it all but impossible to move things nearby. But sooner or later, they might not have a choice. 

“I can’t tell you how many coastal elected officials have said to me, ‘Rob, you know, retreat is not an option from this place.’ And I’m like, well, actually, you are retreating here, here, here, and here,” Young told me. “It’s just you’re doing it in the worst way possible. You’ve got septic tanks rolling around in the sea. That is not a great Chamber of Commerce moment.”

Nearly two decades ago, a group of researchers at the Idaho National Laboratory ran a secret experiment, known as the Aurora Generator Test, on a massive emerald green diesel generator. Using 30 lines of code, they hacked into the generator’s virtual backroom, corrupting safeguards and flipping switches that left it out of sync with the rest of the power grid.

Before an audience of electrical utility executives and energy department officials watching from a nearby room, the 27-ton generator jolted violently, sputtering out a dark smoke as its rubber innards rapidly tore themselves apart. 

“The implication was that with just a few lines of code, you can create conditions that were physically going to be very damaging to the machines we rely on,” lead researcher Michael Assante later told the journalist Andy Greenberg for his book Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin’s Most Dangerous Hackers. “I had a very real pit in my stomach. It was like a glimpse of the future.”

That future seems to have creeped much closer this week, with leading AI developers and executives casually admitting that they believe their creation is, to paraphrase one winking X post, as likely to end humanity as the New York Jets are to make the playoffs this season. Now, exactly how AI would pull off killing everyone is far murkier territory. But as Assante sensed all those years ago, AI may not need to be all-powerful to leap from its virtual cage and into the critical infrastructure that powers our hospitals, flushes our toilets, and pumps water to our faucets. It just needs to fall into the wrong hands. 

Almost any AI doomsday scenario you can think of begins with a swarm of shadowy bots slithering through cyberspace, poking their noses behind the scenes of power plants, toaster ovens, traffic lights, or even, in an utterly extreme case, our nuclear weapons arsenal. If destroying the Aurora generator, at the very least, required a human hacker to write the code, AI has since completely torn down the barrier to entry for wreaking havoc, as the Hugging Face incident demonstrated earlier this year. 

But AI need not go rogue to threaten the power grid or mess with your tap water. A new age of AI-powered, but human-directed hacking is already upon us, experts say. With some of the nation’s most sensitive infrastructure startlingly vulnerable to attack, the most likely AI apocalypse could in fact start with the water tower or generator idling in your backyard. In a worst-case scenario, this could lead to a cascade of scary failures in the systems we rely on to live comfortably modern lives, from running our AC in blazingly hot summers to geolocating our ships and planes.

“Before, you needed to have highly skilled technical expertise,” to pull off some version of a real-life Aurora Generator Test, said Alvaro Cardenas, a computer science professor at UC Santa Cruz. “And now, you just have to have a general idea of what’s possible.”

AI is making an old threat much worse

Not long after the Idaho National Laboratory hacked that poor generator into combustion, the federal government mandated that electrical utilities engage in basic cybersecurity hygiene. 

And yet much of America’s critical infrastructure — like gas pipelines, water desalination plants, or cargo terminals — remains woefully unprepared for even conventional cyber attacks, much less the coming onslaught of AI. 

That’s in part because cyberattacks like the one simulated in the Aurora Generator Test have long been — and still are, to some extent — exceedingly rare, unappealing to most criminal hackers because they’re optimized for disruption rather than financial gain. But in the process of making it extremely easy for anyone to code, AI has also made it extremely easy for almost anyone to vibe hack their way into your online bank account, or, in theory, a local reservoir or the power grid. AI agents can also vastly widen the scope on easy targets because, as Andy Bochman, an expert in infrastructure resilience at West Yost, put it — “they don’t sleep; they don’t get tired; and they don’t get sick.” 

In the past, even those who did want to launch large-scale attacks on infrastructure probably weren’t savvy enough to do so. And while other nations such as China, Iran, and Russia have indeed already breached many of our infrastructure systems (as we have theirs), they haven’t opted to make much of a ruckus once inside. 

“Geopolitics is eroding the idea that those with capability lack the intent, and AI is eroding the other part of it, that those with the intent lack the capability.”

Jason Healey, Columbia University cybersecurity scholar

But that norm is now changing, said Jason Healey, a cybersecurity scholar at Columbia University. “Geopolitics is eroding the idea that those with capability lack the intent, and AI is eroding the other part of it, that those with the intent lack the capability,” he told me. So, on the one hand, a nation like Russia might be much more inclined to actually disrupt our power grid now than it used to be. And, on the other hand, a nihilistic lone wolf or terrorist group could use AI to do much more damage than they ever could before. 

Just last month, we saw a glimpse of what this could look like when dozens of water and wastewater systems in small towns across the nation were attacked by a group of hackers most likely associated with Iran, leading to temporary water stoppages and flooding. These attacks have not been definitively linked to AI, but the National Security Agency warned soon afterward that hackers have been actively using AI to target US infrastructure like it. A few weeks later, President Donald Trump declared a national emergency over foreign interference in the power grid, which referenced the growing threat of cybersecurity.  

Preparing for the worst

Most of the nation’s water systems are extremely local and absurdly exposed to such attacks, so much so that “it’s almost like having a welcome mat” for a would-be hacker, said Bochman, mostly because these utilities are too small and underfunded to do much to stop them. “You have a million other problems to take care of, like aging infrastructure — your stuff’s falling apart because it’s been in the ground for 100 years,” he said. Addressing that deferred maintenance often feels far more urgent than doing “something more on cybersecurity.”

Whether it’s a rogue cluster of agents or a hostile nation-state trying to mess with our electricity, we should prepare our most important infrastructure for the worst. In Bochman’s view, that may mean rejecting the pressure to digitize everything in the first place and moving toward something that resembles the days when “people manned things like substations, communicated by a landline telephone, and read gauges, the analog things,” he said. “The screen is the thing that is infinitely manipulatable.”

Healey, who advised the Biden administration heavily on cybersecurity and infrastructure, believes that the nation desperately needs a coordinated response, between the federal government and AI companies, but also between the US and other countries like China, where similarly powerful models are being developed. And utility systems need to assume they will be a target and improve their cybersecurity practices accordingly, Healey says, ideally with funding from the federal government or, perhaps more appropriately, AI companies. 

Nobody knows precisely how vulnerable America’s infrastructure is to AI right now, in part because policymakers — and perhaps more disturbingly, AI’s creators themselves — seem woefully unsure of how to stop the technology from acting badly (or obeying bad orders) in the first place. For now at least, the solution might be, as Bochman suggests, to pull as many of our critical systems offline as possible, the better to hide it from AI and those who would misuse it.

“When bad things start to happen, no one will know what to do or why because they’re black boxes; the people that make them don’t know what’s going on inside,” Bochman said. “And the poor utility people who ultimately own the risk when someone gets hurt from a system” won’t understand what went wrong either, “and they’ll wish to God they’d never taken it on board.”

On stage at Davos in the Swiss Alps earlier this year, Bill Gates, before an audience of the global do-gooding elite, announced a $50 million partnership between his foundation and an unlikely new ally, OpenAI, aimed at improving healthcare in Rwanda.

Just a month earlier, the Gates Foundation had released a harrowing report about widespread global health cuts and collapsing foreign aid infrastructure, documenting a rise in child deaths for the first time this century. But at Davos, even as the US hemorrhaged funding for vaccines, maternal healthcare, and HIV treatment, the Microsoft co-founder struck an optimistic tone. 

“Using innovation, using AI,” Gates told Reuters, “I think we can get back on track.”

As it turns out, the partnership was just an opening salvo for what’s become a wholesale embrace of AI by the world’s largest global health philanthropy. A $200 million partnership with Anthropic came just a few months later. And then, on Tuesday, the Gates Foundation announced a plan to dole out a jaw-dropping $1 billion over the next two years for scaling up AI interventions across healthcare, education, and agriculture around the world. 

The sense that AI will soon change everything, and mostly for the worse, has perhaps never felt so pressing and alarming as it does right now. But this hefty new commitment is premised on the idea that AI could eventually make our lives much better too. In a country like America, AI requires massive investments and buildout — in the grid, in power, in technology, in water. In many parts of Africa, already infrastructure-poor, the foundation is effectively betting that AI can compensate for some of the infrastructure that isn’t in place or that has been lost — and offer a new layer that can help in education, in delivering healthcare, and more. 

The Gates Foundation’s new commitments include projects to improve how farmers analyze their crops, how doctors diagnose patients, and how students learn. Some have already proven to be quite effective, according to the foundation, with one tool improving the accuracy of medical diagnoses by 16 percent across several Kenyan clinics. “In poorer countries with enormous health worker shortages and lack of health systems infrastructure,” Gates wrote on his blog earlier this year, “AI can be a game-changer in expanding access to quality care.” 

Last year’s foreign aid cuts were unfathomably destructive for some of the world’s poorest countries, shuttering thousands of clinics and perhaps hundreds of thousands of classrooms in places where critical workers and supplies were already stretched thin. No, AI cannot deliver a baby, administer a vaccine, or manage a classroom — not yet, at least — but it can, the Gates Foundation hopes, help ease the burden and augment the quality of care for nurses and teachers now tasked with serving far more people than any one person should. 

“This is the most transformative technology of our lifetime,” Mark Suzman, CEO of the Gates Foundation, told me, and while there are “very real risks and challenges” surrounding AI, it also presents genuine opportunities to tangibly improve many people’s lives.  

It is a tantalizing premise: We can’t afford to build clinics, hire teachers, or lay new power lines, but perhaps AI could create the digital infrastructure needed to help billions of people do more with what they have — or rather, with what’s left. The question is, can the right layer of innovation help bolster a buckling system, even as the physical and logistical infrastructure surrounding it crumbles?

Is AI really what global health needs right now? 

Most Americans have yet to see AI improve their lives in meaningful ways, much less those living in poverty or in countries where only a sliver of the population has ever used ChatGPT. 

But those numbers in the developing world are slowly changing, a shift enabled in part by other global health funders convinced that as foreign aid dries up, AI could soon help the world do more with less. The Trump administration itself is on board with this thinking, so long as it benefits American tech companies. Last year, the State Department announced a $150 million partnership with the drone company Zipline to transport medical supplies in several countries.

To Zipline’s credit, an NPR reporter in Rwanda last month found that the company’s drones were already saving lives in places with poor road infrastructure, where driving to the nearest hospital can take hours on winding hills, but where drones can deliver crucial blood transfusions within minutes. 

And yet, for Rwandans to benefit fully from these high-tech deliveries, they need staffed clinics to visit. As a result of foreign aid cuts, some of those literal landing spots are now on the verge of closing in some of the nation’s most vulnerable rural corridors. “Without the underlying infrastructure, like roads, energy and power and unless there is accessibility, rural and otherwise,” Enoh Ebong, president of the global development department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told NPR, “then all of these solutions will stop short.”

But just as medical delivery drones still need a clinic to fly to, most of these interventions require some layer of physical infrastructure — roads, schools, power, and quite obviously, broadband  — to function. Satellite imagery shows that some rural communities in sub-Saharan Africa quite literally went dark in the aftermath of USAID cuts. It will be much harder for their kids to prompt an AI math tutor, or for a local farmer to download a weather app. 

“We’re seeing this very much as a both/and,” Suzman told me, calling more traditional funding for education and healthcare “the bedrock for long-term economic growth,” which AI is meant to supplement, not replace. But, in practice, foreign aid cuts have left serious cracks across much of that bedrock, which could make it harder for state-of-the-art solutions to function as intended.  

It is obviously not incumbent on the Gates Foundation to pay for all of this alone – nor would it even be feasible for them to do so. And for the record, plenty of the foundation’s other grant programs are not AI-related at all. But this tension does speak to a broader question that may be felt most acutely in a context like global health, but ultimately one that touches us all: Do we spend our scarce resources on the digital infrastructure of the future at the peril of our needs right now? Could you justify buying the new $1,999 folding iPhone if you can barely afford to buy groceries? 

The answer is not actually always an easy one. It is not for us to say, for example, that just because a community lacks reliable running water, its people should be excluded from the benefits (and encumbrances) of the smartphone, especially if that smartphone can connect them to health advice they could never access otherwise, or guidance that could help them survive a drought. 

In some parts of the world, digital forms of banking arrived long before local brick-and-mortar branches did, instantaneously connecting countless people to a cheap and secure way to save and send their cash to family and friends in need. It is certainly possible that AI, or at least the kind of applications the Gates Foundation funds, could one day have a similarly transformative effect on how people access personalized levels of care, education, and other services in places without the resources to do so otherwise. 

That is the hope, but it is also hard right now to believe uncritically in a technology that, as Gates himself blogged just last month, “will either be the greatest equalizer ever invented, or the worst source of injustice,” ushering in “one of the most turbulent times in human history.” 

In an interview with the New York Times soon after, he seemed convinced that AI will likely do more harm than good. “I don’t like bringing bad news to people, and I don’t like saying that innovation may be a net negative,” he said. “But that’s where we are.”

Now he wants billions of people around the world to use it? Yes, Suzman said, because if not, then inevitably the best parts of AI — the potential for exponentially better cancer treatments, for example — will go only “to those who can pay for it,” while the worst parts of it will fall, as they so often do, on those who benefit the least. “These decisions are being made now,” he said, “and the decisions being made now will then probably shape the following two decades.” Here’s hoping they’re good ones.

In 2012, Southern California was besotted with an unlikely celebrity: a telegenic mountain lion who had crossed one of the state’s most perilous freeways, seeking a territory to call his own. Widely deemed “LA’s loneliest lion” and “most eligible bachelor,” the chiseled puma in question, named P-22, roamed the bustling but otherwise big cat-less Hollywood Hills, unable to safely return to the home he’d left behind. His search for a mate below the Hollywood Sign rendered him an icon of his city, but also a rueful reminder of the sprawling highways that bifurcated his habitat in the first place, leaving his clan on the other side of I-405 on the verge of local extinction. 

Beth Pratt, then recently named head of California’s branch of the National Wildlife Federation, remembers strolling through Griffith Park with the wildlife biologist Jeff Sikich in 2012. Pratt knew that P-22 roamed somewhere nearby, and she found herself wondering aloud how she could help. “Well, there’s this little wildlife corridor we need to get built,” Sikich told her. 

“I’m like, ‘Sure, how hard can it be?’” she recalled to me with a laugh. “Well, apparently, it’s quite hard.”

Fourteen years later, the project they discussed that day, now known as the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing, is finally scheduled to open in December. When it does, it will be the largest real-life animal crossing in the world, a gorgeous, vegetated overpass offering safe passage to local mountain lions, coyotes, deer, and black bears across the perilous 10-lane Ventura Freeway, where P-22 dodged cars back in 2012. 

Though P-22 died before he could take advantage of that crossing himself, he helped engender a movement that, hard as it may have been to pull off in LA, could help revolutionize how animals cross America’s most dangerous roads, preventing some of the hundreds of human deaths, hundreds of millions of animal deaths, and billions in damages caused by wildlife collisions each year. 

It is a species of elegant, bipartisan infrastructure that, if you squint, might even make you believe in America’s ability to build again, and to build in a way that still lends a hand — a paw, if you will — to the least empowered among us, a stranded salamander or the loneliest of lions. 

As Pratt put it: “What’s more hopeful than rewilding one of the world’s busiest freeways?”

Wildlife crossings used to be rare in the US. Not anymore.

When Pratt first pitched the idea for a wildlife crossing across the 101, such projects were still rare in the US, and rarer still across such a major thoroughfare. As she recalls it, California’s transportation agency initially reacted with bafflement when she put the idea forward, a sign of just how novel the project was at the time. That made the process of getting it built more grueling than it needed to be, and likely more expensive, with a final price tag of over $100 million.

But as LA meandered in its quest to build its unprecedented 210-feet-long Wallis Annenberg — beset, Pratt told me, by its complex engineering mandate, a funding model that relied on philanthropy, and the rising costs associated with construction and extreme weather — the rest of the nation took notice. In the 14 years since P-22 first crossed the 101 and the 405, over 1,000 new wildlife corridors have sprouted up across the country, a trend that culminated with the $350 million Wildlife Crossings Pilot Program, created in 2021 as part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Many of these projects were championed by Pete Buttigieg, who was Transportation secretary under the Biden administration, and who told Vox last year that such passages are “not ornamental,” but rather “something that ties into the very core of our mission, which is to secure the safety of the American traveling public.”

America’s burst of new wildlife corridors include a camouflaged overpass for elk crossing Interstate 25 in Colorado; a lush shared land bridge for deer, bobcats, and people passing over a Texan parkway; crossings for alligators passing under I-75 in the Florida everglades; and tiny tunnels under the Atlantic City expressway in New Jersey for migrating toadlets. California’s transportation agency, for its part, now boasts a division explicitly dedicated to building wildlife crossings, though many projects need not be as ambitious as the Wallis Annenberg.

“Sometimes it’s pretty simple,” like a small hole to let hedgehogs through your fencing or a buzz stop for bees and butterflies crossing your lawn, Pratt said. “Sometimes it’s in your own backyard.”

Along the way, a new set of norms have begun settling in at transportation agencies across the country, said Marcel Huijser, a research ecologist at the Western Transportation Institute, who noted that while “road ecology has become more recognized” in the US, the nation still has a very long way to go. Huijser is from the Netherlands, where wildlife crossings have been the norm for decades. The country boasts thousands of them in an area roughly double that of Massachusetts.

“Most other parts of the world have done a better job at taking social and ecological impacts into consideration from the earliest decision processes onwards,” he told me, rather than “making it an afterthought.” And given that highways are already three times more expensive to build and maintain per mile in the US than they are elsewhere, it’s not the cost of conservation alone that has long kept the nation from incorporating such concerns into its road planning.

Instead, as Huijser put it, “the norms, the values, [and] the culture” of the country have, until recently, ensured that planners rarely baked ecological considerations into the way it imagines its roadways. Wildlife advocates have instead been forced to rely, as activists in the US so often must, on a hodgepodge of lawsuits and local lobbying.

The Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing could well be transformative for local wildlife, and help keep Angelenos safer on the road for generations, but its most promising legacy may in fact be how it helped inspire a much broader movement and tranche of funding. The pilot program that P-22 helped inspire is now up for renewal, and seems poised to become permanent by the time that the Wallis Annenberg crossing opens in December. 

Few wildlife corridors in the US will benefit from an über famous spokes-cat like P-22, a tireless local advocate like Pratt, or a roster of movie stars and philanthropists willing to pour time and money into building a new kind of bridge. Keeping local and federal governments on board with the projects may also be an uphill battle, given the national tenor. While many wildlife crossings have been embraced on a bipartisan basis, just a few months ago, Pratt received death threats after a smattering of right-wing media outlets assailed the Wallis Annenberg as a “butterfly bridge” to nowhere.

But if the US can successfully channel that cougar’s enduring star power into sustained support for a smart newish-to-us kind of infrastructure, one that’s been consistently shown to make a road much safer — and ultimately, cheaper! — for humans and animals alike, then maybe there’s a fair chance for the rest of us, and maybe this stubborn nation can get better at building things more like it. 

“These things should just be part of transportation budgets and embedded in our infrastructure planning,” said Pratt, who is planning her first vacation in seven years once the bridge finally opens in December. “The ultimate goal is you don’t need someone like me.”

During a tense vote on a data center being built in her drought-stricken Arizona district last summer, Tucson City Councilmember Nikki Lee made an unlikely pitch: “We’re going to get a little out-of-this-world for a second, so just bear with me.” 

Like many of her constituents, Lee did not want Project Blue, a sprawling 290-acre data center, gobbling up an ounce of her local drinking water. “We need to put data centers where they belong,” she said, and “we don’t think data centers belong in the desert.”  

President Donald Trump’s recent bluster aside, it’s possible that the only thing as bipartisan as loving Dolly Parton is hating data centers, whose construction has become so controversial, so costly, and so backlogged here on Earth that companies like Google, Meta, and of course, SpaceX, are actively flirting with the idea of flinging them into orbit instead. Soon after the Tucson City Council rejected Project Blue’s attempt to connect to city utilities, Amazon Web Services, the secretive intended beneficiary, pulled out of the project, and another Jeff Bezos company, Blue Origin, filed a plan with regulators for tens of thousands of possible new data centers, this time, destined for orbit. 

Sure, launching a hyperscale AI data center into space is still unprecedented engineering-wise, carries an unfathomably large price tag, could engender its own severe environmental risks, and may or may not draw unwelcome attention from the hunters among the stars. But for AI companies, such trade-offs might still be preferable to the terrestrial roadblocks, among them an explosive populist backlash and a 12-year wait to connect to the power grid. 

Next Thursday, Google plans to launch a pilot satellite capable of processing basic AI queries into orbit, the most significant test yet in what’s become a burgeoning race to power AI from space. For now, the satellite won’t approach the levels of computing power at a hulking terrestrial data center like Project Blue. But it is a major step toward a future in which many or even most of our AI queries will be powered not from the outskirts of a city like Tucson, but from a blinking data center circling the skies.

SpaceX’s gargantuan initial public offering earlier this summer was predicated on the idea that it would launch a thus-far-unrealized fleet of orbital data centers to fuel much of the AI economy. The company — whose rockets Google will use to launch its pilot — claims that by the end of this decade, possibly as early as 2028, it will have successfully assembled an AI data center in orbit, with plans to eventually harvest a staggering 100 gigawatts of new solar energy for AI annually, equivalent to one-fifth of all US electricity consumption last year. (As always, that’s a very iffy promise.)

Still, as Google’s overtures clearly demonstrate, it’s no longer a question of if large-scale space-based data centers could be technically feasible, but rather when they’ll be ready to launch, and perhaps more importantly, whether the math of using them to power something like AI will make much financial sense anytime soon. As of now, building a one-gigawatt data center in space would cost about $51.5 billion, according to an analysis by aerospace engineer Andrew McCalip, compared with $16 billion for one on land.

“They’re not breaking any rules of physics. Yes, there are going to be engineering challenges, but they are all solvable with enough time and money,” said Jason Aspiotis, a leading space systems engineer who now leads an orbital data center startup. “The gray area is, well, what about the economics?” 

But even if this astronomically kooky plan does take off, it may not change much for those of us left on terra firma: Our energy bills will remain high, even if data centers aren’t there to drive them up. Our earthly infrastructure — affordable housing, public transit, and more — may be just as hard to build as ever. Harder even, maybe, given that crucial resources and untapped tax revenue will be literally rocketing up out of our reach.

No, if these tech giants succeed, it will not fix what’s wrong here on Earth, but merely prove once again their exemption to the gravitational forces holding the rest of us down.  

Space-based data centers, explained

My father spent most of his career working in the satellite industry, and would sometimes let me waltz inside the quaint little data center housed in his office, a room I remember as roughly the size of my school’s computer lab, hosting rows upon rows of servers that I couldn’t touch, churning with a cool, mechanical hum as they crunched zeroes and ones.

AI data centers work similarly to that server room but on an exponentially larger scale, requiring far more land and energy to run, and much more extravagant cooling systems. Sending his office’s data center into orbit would have been extraordinarily difficult, and getting one of the facilities that powers modern LLMs aloft would be an even larger, more ambitious undertaking. But the benefits — namely, “cheap space (no pun intended) and power,” as my dad put it to me recently — are even more enticing.

An orbital data center need not negotiate with an elected official like Lee over precious water rights to the Colorado River, though it would need to install bigger-than-football-field-sized heat radiators to keep itself cool. You can’t simply launch something that big into orbit, meaning a space-based hyperscale data center — the size of which would likely rival that of the International Space Station — would need to be assembled piece by piece, probably by robots. And while the sun would provide an endless supply of solar power to process your ChatGPT queries, it would also inflict incessant radiation on delicate circuitry. If something breaks, you can’t send a technician up to fix it. Many experts are also concerned that if an excess of space junk, which extraterrestrial data centers would inevitably produce, begins colliding like bumper cars in Earth’s low orbit, it could knock out the orbital infrastructure we already rely on, like GPS navigation and weather satellites. 

Even plastic decays in space, said Sven Bilén, a professor of aerospace engineering at Penn State, who, like Aspiotis, believes that early orbital data centers will probably be “processing data from space, like spatial imaging satellites or weather satellites, as opposed to, you know, cat videos” or AI-generated reality TV slop. 

But even if AI is not the lowest-hanging fruit for deploying compute into space, it is certainly the deepest-pocketed, meaning that many investors and companies like SpaceX and Google seem quite willing to shoulder the start-up costs anyway. And considering how difficult it’s gotten to build data centers on Earth, or at least in the United States, it’s indeed possible that space could become the cheaper, or at least most convenient option, more quickly than one might think. 

“In some form or another, in five years, we are going to have some orbital data centers in space for sure,” Krishna Muralidharan, who leads the Center for Semiconductor Manufacturing at the University of Arizona, told me, but it’s hard to say right now whether those consist of just a few expensive prototypes, or the beginning of a much bigger swing toward orbital compute. “Only time will tell whether you’re going to have a business case for it.”

Can we send our data center problem into space?

So, is it better to have a data center in space or in your backyard?

David Reid, a member of Virginia’s House of Delegates representing Loudoun County, home to more data centers than anywhere else on Earth, says the question has repeatedly come up at his town hall meetings. Reid is the rare politician — apart from the president, anyway — willing to defend terrestrial data centers, calling them a “money-printing machine” for local schools and infrastructure. Having spent decades working in the defense and technology sectors, he is doubtful that the math on orbital data centers will ever make sense.

“I believe this is, for lack of a better term, fictional nonsense,” he said, and is “creating a distraction from the fact that local officials here on Earth still need to make better zoning decisions.”

If most of the AI industry can eventually be powered by space, as SpaceX claims, it will require millions of sprawling new satellites, in an orbit currently dotted by fewer than 20,000 of them. Though “space is really big,” as Elon Musk has put it, one million satellites would still profoundly and, likely irrevocably, transform our night sky into one in which data centers outnumber visible stars.

“Will humanity notice if there are fewer stars in the sky? Well, not so much right now,” given light pollution in many cities, said John Barentine, an astronomer and environmental advocate for the night sky. “But what if they’re replaced by these artificial stars in the night sky? Is that the point at which people will say, ‘Wait a minute, we don’t want this. We want the benefits, but we don’t want this as a consequence.’”

This is, of course, the tension also at the heart of building data centers here on Earth. To some extent, they’re the most tangible representations of how little power we have to shape the course of a transformative new technology that few trust, and even fewer asked for. It’s one thing to object to a hulking data center, but it might be another altogether to see the sigils of our digital overlords illuminating the firmament. Would a place like Tucson, one of the most beautiful places to stargaze in the world, prefer a Project Blue to a starscape marred by blinking servers in the sky?

Update, September 24, 10:35 am ET: This post was originally published on September 3 and has been updated to include information about a pilot satellite capable of processing basic AI queries that Google is launching soon.