After years of waiting, Infrastructure Week finally happened. Last Wednesday, U.S. senators reached a bipartisan agreement on a $550 billion infrastructure bill, working through the weekend to finalize the text. On Sunday, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said the bill could be voted on “in a matter of days.”
While Congress was debating the size of the check, researchers at Princeton University’s Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment were preparing a report showing that the pace of infrastructure investment will have to speed up—considerably—to reach President Joe Biden’s goal of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
That pace question is the critical issue,” said Chris Greig, senior research scientist at Princeton and author of the report, published today. “Doing things the way we’ve always done them, we will fail in this mission to net zero by 2050.”