The Crisis of Infrastructure Resilience:

The Clash of Blue and Green

…and Red

Dr. Lewis J. Perelman

Presentation to
The Economic Security Working Group
U.S. Department of Commerce
October 21, 2008
© 2008, Lewis J. Perelman

© 2008, 2009 Lewis J. Perelman

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 Three Major Competing Agendas

• The Green Agenda: Sustainability

• The Blue Agenda: Security

• The Red Agenda: Solvency

© 2008, Lewis J. Perelman

Overlaid on economic and cultural interests that traditionally have shaped infrastructure development, the
rising demand for sweeping infrastructure renewal—even reinvention—is being driven three competing policy
agendas. The demands of these agendas is a problem in three colors: green vs. blue vs. red.
•The “green” agenda identifies itself with “Sustainability.” The green movement, as is widely understood,
advocates environmental protection, resource conservation, “renewable” resources, and “green” buildings and
infrastructure, among other things, especially “climate protection.” Its notion of “sustainability” commonly is
associated with “corporate social responsibility” (CSR) as indicated by such metrics as the “triple bottom line”
(meant to merge economic, environmental, and social welfare goals in corporate accounting).
•The “blue” agenda is primarily focused on “Security,” including “Safety.” It embraces the demands for
national and homeland security. Its mission starts from preventing or protecting against various hazards or
threats against human security and extends to responding to attacks or disasters when they occur, and
recovering from their consequences. The menu of blue concerns spans the spectrum of human anxieties,
including: war, terrorism, violent crime, industrial accidents, infectious disease, and economic, social, or
political disasters as well as all sorts of natural disaster.
•The “red” agenda is that of the harsh financial and fiscal realities that determine “Solvency” or, more urgently
now, its opposite. The color of this agenda aptly reflects the “red ink” of the ocean of debt in which America
and many of its global partners are now drowning. Across a span of years past, exponents of the red agenda
sounded alarms about the impending threats of rising deficits and national debt, unfunded liabilities,
excessively easy money and cheap credit, overleveraging, opaque accounting, lax regulation, and the house of
cards built of synthetic financial “derivatives.” Now the day of reckoning has arrived and the alarms that were
ignored, and the corrections that were postponed, no longer can be avoided.

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 The Clash of Agendas
Solvency

Sustainability Security

Synergy

InSolvency

© 2008, Lewis J. Perelman

Politics traditionally is slanted to avoid zero-sum games and to serve all demands
simultaneously. And there are some specific cases where cost-effective solutions exist that
can serve both security and environmental objectives while containing or reducing overall
budget costs.
But the zone of happy synergy between green and blue agendas is limited. In far more
cases the green and blue agendas compete for resources and design requirements. Up until
the recent past, rather than tradeoffs being reconciled in some kind of rational design
process, the conflicts often were simply fudged, with extra green and blue baubles heaped
on groaning architectural Christmas trees to appease separate constituencies, and the bloated
costs paid through separate line items. In the past that was wasteful; from now on it will be
increasingly impossible.
The tide of red ink rising from below the black line of solvency in the chart already limits
the comfortable zone of synergy. The prodigious financial demands of either the blue or the
green agendas already has begun to seem infeasible.

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 The Clash
• The Southeast drought: city v. fish v. power
• Nuclear power: climate v. weapons/accidents
• EPA ‘Smart Growth’ v. public safety

• Other examples:
– BRAC, Fort Belvoir: security v. traffic pollution
– The Hurriquake® Nail: durability v. recycling
– US-Mexico border: fence v. wildlife
– Navy sonar training range v. whales
– Seattle Viaduct: new urbanism v. ‘lifeline’

© 2008, Lewis J. Perelman

Some of many possible examples of the blue vs. green clash include:
•The recent drought in the Southeast US at times left the 4 million people in metropolitan Atlanta
with only enough water to last about 90 days. Yet the US Corps of Engineers was required to release
a billion gallons of water a day from the city’s main Lanier reservoir to protect an endangered
species of fish downstream in Florida; the water also is needed to cool the Farley nuclear power plant
in Alabama.
•Some environmentalists now advocate expanding nuclear power to fight global warming; others
claim that the threat of nuclear accidents and weapons proliferation makes nuclear power
unacceptable.
•Police, fire, and other public safety officials object that the EPA’s Smart Growth program leads to
dense developments with narrow streets that hinder access by emergency vehicles. Many recent
Smart Growth developments have sprung up in vulnerable areas of the Gulf Coast devastated by
previous hurricanes. (See next slide.)

Other examples are:

•The federal government plans to move some 20 thousand defense workers from urban offices in the
Washington area to the more secure location of Fort Belvoir. But local officials and citizens in
Northern Virginia protest that the increased traffic congestion will increase air pollution and energy
consumption.
•The Bostitch Hurriquake® nail was designed to increase the ability of wooden buildings to survive
wind damage by 200% and earthquake damage by 50%. But a leading green building architect
complains that it will make collapsed buildings harder to recycle.
•The ‘fence’ designed to thwart illegal immigration, and possible terrorist intrusion, along the US-
Mexican border is challenged by lawsuits form environmental groups who claim it will impede
wildlife migration and damage the environment.
•Environmental organizations also have sued to stop the US Navy’s plans to test and train with new
sonar systems, which may cause beaked whales to beach themselves.
•Since a 2001 earthquake rocked the Seattle area, environmentalists have called for removing the
Alaska Way Viaduct to improve the city’s waterfront environment and discourage commuting. But
emergency management officials want to strengthen the Viaduct to protect the city’s transportation
‘lifelines’—for evacuation, rescue, and recovery—in the event of future disasters.

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 Can ‘Smart Growth’ be in dumb
locations?
Will this…

… become this?

Seaside, FL: ‘Smart Growth’

Galveston, TX after Hurricane Ike

© 2008, Lewis J. Perelman

Research by Prof. Philip Berke and colleagues at the University of North Carolina found
that many “Smart Growth” communities are being built in coastal and other locations highly
vulnerable to disaster.

This, among other examples, illustrates how disconnected the Green concept of
“sustainability” is from the common-sense notion of survivability. And why
“sustainability” is often not really sustainable or sustained.

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 The Red Challenge
• Blue demands: $2+ Trillion/5 years
• Green demands: $ X Trillions/Y years
• Red crisis:
– $10 Trillion federal debt
– $2 Trillion deficit
– $50-100 Trillion unfunded liabilities
– $1 Trillion outstanding credit-card debt
– $1 Trillion for housing, financial bailouts
– Hard realities of entitlements:
• 70% of federal budget by 2030
• 20% of US GDP by 2034

© 2008, Lewis J. Perelman

The costs of meeting the demands of either the blue or green infrastructure agendas
separately loom large. Estimates from the American Society of Civil Engineers and others
indicate that $2 trillion needs to be spent over a span of five years just to moderately
mitigate the danger to public safety posed by America’s crumbling, brittle, and hazardous
infrastructure.
While the real costs and potential benefits of the green agenda just for “climate
protection”—mitigating the expected future impacts of global warming—are debated, even
the more modest estimates imply infrastructure renovation costs to the U.S. on a similar
scale of hundreds of billions of dollars annually. The cost of the Warner-Lieberman bill of
2008 alone was estimated at $1 trillion or more. (The CBO estimate of the cost of the
Waxman-Markey bill of 2009 of more than $800 billion was widely criticized for omitting
most of the negative economic impacts of reduced business activity and employment caused
by higher energy costs—projected to be several times greater.)
All this comes at a time when America now stands at the edge of a fiscal cliff, beyond
which stretches an abyss of economic disaster from mushrooming debt, financial collapse,
and ballooning entitlements.

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 The Red Challenge…more
• Estimated economic cost of global
warming = $48-76 Trillion

• Value of Credit Default Swaps sold in

2007 = $62 Trillion

• Total outstanding amount of financial

derivatives = $684 Trillion (2008)
– 12x World GDP

© 2008, Lewis J. Perelman

The squeeze of massive and growing debt has been compounded by the cancerous impact
on the global financial system of inadequate regulation and the explosive spread of
synthetic financial assets.
What once seemed like a prodigious potential economic cost of global warming at the end
of the century now appears minor compared to the enormous, immediate threat of toxic
financial assets.

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 Possible Synergy
• Telework
– Less energy, less pollution, more security, lower cost,
higher productivity
• Zero-energy buildings
– More resilient emergency facilities?
• Marines, Air Force:
– Solar, renewable, recycling tech
• Green + blue – red: infrastructure
– Near-term ROI from efficiency that just-in-case hazard
mitigation lacks
© 2008, Lewis J. Perelman

The green and blue agendas do not always need to be in conflict. There even are
opportunities for positive synergy. For example, Telework reduces emissions and saves
energy and other resources, moreover not only saving money but improving productivity,
and on top of that enhancing security and disaster resilience. Zero-energy buildings could
enable police or fire stations, shelters, hospitals, communications facilities, embassies, and
such to keep functioning in the wake of a disaster even when electrical or fuel supplies are
interrupted.
And while it may not serve everyone’s priorities, even the Defense Department has an
increasing, practical interest in green solutions. The Marine Corps is looking to apply solar,
renewable, and recycling technologies on the sites of operations in places like Iraq or
Afghanistan, to reduce the need for vulnerable truck convoys to supply fuel and water. And
the Air Force, which is as pinched by high fuel costs as airlines or anyone else, is making a
serious effort to develop and use biofuels, synthetic fuels, or other alternatives.
Moreover, green infrastructure investments can offer near-term, tangible returns from
efficiencies in energy and resource use that just-in-case investments in hazard risk
mitigation often do not. To the extent that the design features of both can be integrated
economically, the economics of hazard mitigation could become more attractive while
sustainability could become more truly equivalent to survivability.

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 Synergy or Compromise?
Freedom Tower, New York

Federal Bldg,
US Embassy,
San Francisco
Baghdad

“Fortress America”; but not efficient

Greening + hardening = $$$$$
Green wind turbines & rain storage

Safety trimmed to lower rents © 2008, Lewis J. Perelman Solid concrete anti-blast wall

Most of the casualties of the bombings of the Murrah Building (Oklahoma City) and US
embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were caused by shattered window glass, not structural
collapse. Since then, building security criteria have stressed replacing glass curtain walls
with solid concrete/masonry, as in the new US embassy in Baghdad on the left.
The Freedom Tower (center), planned to replace the World Trade Center towers, embodies
a mélange of compromises of security, sustainability, economic, and aesthetic demands.
These include a solid concrete outer wall rising 200 feet from the base, to deter bomb
attack, and wind turbines in the top levels to earn renewable energy credit.
The new San Francisco Federal Building (on the right), designed to win LEED Gold or
Platinum certification, is encased in glass to provide natural illumination. Windows open
automatically for natural ventilation. All of which makes the building vulnerable to attack
by blast or by CBR weapons. The windows of the San Francisco building are covered with a
steel mesh and are made of blast-resistant glass, to mitigate the impact of bomb attack.
However these expensive features substantially increased the cost of construction. The
General Services Administration so far has declined to provide data to indicate whether the
total lifecycle cost of this structure is greater or less than that of alternative, less ‘green’
designs. However, a GSA official stated that the State Department’s embassy design chose
to minimize windows in favor of concrete outer walls to reduce costs.

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 Needed
A new, coherent, doctrine of
infrastructure Resilience that is:
• Effective
• Efficient
• Affordable 
• Politically realistic

© 2008, Lewis J. Perelman

Blue and green optimists would like to believe that America is rich enough to pay the price
tag for each of their agendas simultaneously—and that there is no “zero-sum game”
between the demands for greater security and sustainability. But the fast-unfolding
economic and financial crises suggest that the country may be hard pressed to pay for either.
It clearly cannot afford duplicative, contradictory, or wasteful efforts.
All of which underscores the urgency to come up with a new doctrine of infrastructure
renewal that is effective, efficient, affordable and politically realistic.

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 Practical Issues
• Potential for synergy
– Within budget limits
• Tradeoffs in practice
– Within budget limits
• Economics
– Risk/benefit/cost analysis
• Real Politics
• To Do

© 2008, Lewis J. Perelman

Potential for synergy. What design elements or solutions produce, or could produce,
benefits that simultaneously serve both security/safety and environmental efficiency
demands, within budget limitations?
Tradeoffs in practice. How do planners, architects, or engineers resolve conflicts and
establish priorities between demands for security/safety and demands for environmental
efficiency, again within budget limitations?
Economics. What are the relative risks, costs, and benefits of competing blue and green
agendas for infrastructure renewal? What capital resources are available to meet either
or both demands? How reliable is the accounting for the risks, costs, and benefits of
each? What accounting improvements are needed?
Real politics. What are the actual political interests and conflicts surrounding the blue and
green policy agendas? What specific initiatives are most likely and least likely to be
politically do-able?
To Do. What should be done to resolve intersecting blue and green infrastructure
development issues by (a) the public sector? (b) the private sector? (c) philanthropy? (d)
academia? (e) nongovernmental organizations?

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 Churchill

Sometimes it is not enough to do our best.

We must do what is required.

© 2008, Lewis J. Perelman

CONTACT:
Dr. Lewis J. Perelman
Email: kanbrain@post.harvard.edu

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